I'd like to write a little library for JavaScript enums. For me to do that, I need to decide how to store the enum values. Therefore, I'd like to use the fastest way when comparing, but I also want something that is debuggable, so I'm torn between using strings or numbers. I know I could use objects too, but that would be another question
For example
// I don't want this because when debugging, you'd see just the value 0
var Planets = {Earth:0, Mars:1, Venus: 2}
// I'd prefer this so that Planets.Earth gives me a nice readable value (Earth)
var Planets = {Earth: 'Earth', Mars: 'Mars'}
But I'm afraid that when I compare them using if (myPlanet === Planet.Earth)
, the string comparison could take a lot longer (say if it were in a tight loop). This should be the case because http://ecma-international.org/ecma-262/5.1/#sec-11.9.6 says
If Type(x) is String, then return true if x and y are exactly the same sequence of characters (same length and same characters in corresponding positions); otherwise, return false.
But when I wrote a test case, I found that they take the same amount of time http://jsperf.com/string-comparison-versus-number-comparison/2 so it doesn't seem like it's scanning the whole string.
I know this could be a micro optimization, but my question is: is string equality comparison done using pointers and therefore just as fast as number equality comparison?