quick script to compare the performance/output of superjson and devalue, following this Twitter thread.

git clone [email protected]:Rich-Harris/superjson-and-devalue
cd superjson-and-devalue
npm i
node index.js

The sample object is small and simple — different objects may have different outcomes.

Note: I couldn't get things like Sets or repeated references to work with superjson (it complained about circular references).

To see how much superjson.deserialize adds to the client bundle, run this:

npm run build
cat bundle-size/output-superjson.js | wc -c

(With Terser installed globally, you can do cat bundle-size/output-superjson.js | terser -cm | wc -c to check minified size, or chuck a | gzip -9 in there to see zipped size.)

In node 16.15.1 on an M1 Max, [email protected] handily beats [email protected] on all tests:

superjson output: 183 bytes
devalue output: 116 bytes

() => superjson.stringify(obj)
1000000 iterations in 8543ms

() => devalue(obj)
1000000 iterations in 3190ms

() => superjson.parse(superjson_serialized)
1000000 iterations in 3343ms

() => eval(`(${devalue_serialized})`)
1000000 iterations in 261ms

superjson.deserialize adds 12.3kb to your client bundle size. (devalue adds 0kb, because there's no runtime.)