Replacing benchmark/compare.R with a JavaScript implementation

[joyeecheung]

Since I updated to macOS Monterey and R 4.2+ I am no longer able to install the packages required by compare.R. I recently found out about https://github.com/targos/node-benchmark-compare (h/t @targos) and gave it a try, it worked very well for me. I think in the past we had discussion about replacing this script with a JS implementation, it didn't end up fruitful because of the lack of implementation of the statistical distribution required by the script. Now that seems to be solved already by https://github.com/nearform/node-cephes (see #44974 (comment)). So I am wondering if it's time to reopen the discussion.

I think we can basically just vendor in the node-benchmark-compare package into tools/ or benchmark/ and replace the command cat results.csv | Rscript benchmark/compare.R with node-benchmark-compare results.csv (both the benchmark guide and the script used by the CI need to be updated, though in the case of the latter we might have to un-archive the repo, or edit the CI config to point to somewhere else?)

[Trott]

Since node-benchmark-compare is already described in the benchmark guide at https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/doc/contributing/writing-and-running-benchmarks.md#benchmark-analysis-requirements and https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/doc/contributing/writing-and-running-benchmarks.md#filtering-benchmarks, the changes there could be small. Like, you could move the node-benchmark-compare stuff above the compare.R stuff in the benchmark guide, and maybe that's all we need to do.

IThe scripts that need to be updated are...in @addaleax's fork of that repo. 😱 We probably want to change that....

Anyway, this is a fork of the repo you linkied to that was archived. The script still uses compare.R. So I guess we'd have to change it to use npx node-benchmark-compare or go with your plan of putting node-benchmark-compare in the core repo. (If we do that, let's perhaps grab run.sh from Anna's fork and put it here or in the build repo instead?)

[github-actions]

This issue has been marked as stale due to 210 days of inactivity.
It will be automatically closed in 30 days if no further activity occurs. If this is still relevant, please leave a comment or update it to keep it open.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically closed after 30 days of inactivity following its stale status (no activity for a total of 120 days).
If this is still relevant, feel free to reopen it or leave a comment with additional details so we can continue the discussion.