Benchmarks

JMH numbers from benchmarks/, in three groups:

1. Optic micro-benchmarks — per-call overhead over hand-written field access, with Monocle alongside as the other optics library on the operations both implement.
2. Integration: edit without decoding — one realistic Order document edited through circe / avro / jsoniter, measured against the decode-modify-encode you'd write by hand (and Monocle, which pays the same round-trip).
3. PowerSeries composition — composed multi-focus traversal chains, measured against the hand-written copy + map and the equivalent Monocle composition.

How these were measured

All figures are average time per operation in nanoseconds (ns/op); lower is better. Absolute numbers vary by hardware — the ratios are the durable signal.

Every table comes from the reproducible benchmarks.yml CI workflow (always the same environment — ubuntu-22.04 / temurin@21, -f 3 -wi 3 -i 5, error half-widths ≤ ~5 %, mostly ≤ 2 %), and anyone with Actions access can re-run it. The figures are gathered across several runs of that workflow, though — each table is refreshed when its bench changes, so a table is internally consistent (one run) but two tables may come from different run instances. Since each run is a fresh shared VM, treat cross-table absolute comparisons loosely; within a table, and for the ratios everywhere, the signal holds.

JMH caveat. A shared CI runner still isn't a tuned, quiet desktop, so read these as reproducible directional data — the shape and the ratios — not sub-nanosecond truth. See Reproducing and benchmarks/README.md.

Optic micro-benchmarks

For a single operation the hand-written baseline is direct field access (order.id) or a copy — sub-nanosecond, the floor any optic adds overhead over. The honest question these tables answer is how little an optic costs over that floor. eo is the cats-eo method; Monocle is the same operation in the other optics library, shown alongside as a reference point — the ratio column, where present, is the two libraries head to head.

Lens (Tuple2 carrier) — shallow order.id and a depth-3 customer.address.street:

The cost over hand-written field access is essentially nil. GetReplaceLens stores get / enplace as plain fields and specialises its fused modify, so the hot path is a two-function composition — no (X, A) tuple allocation — and get lands within a few tenths of a ns of a bare order.id. Monocle sits in the same place. Monocle is faster on the depth-3 street modify (~1.2×): both rebuild the same three records through a fused composed optic (EO's inline GetReplaceLens.andThen, Monocle's composed Lens), and EO's per-hop get/enplace closure pair carries a touch more indirection than Monocle's purpose-built case class Lens — a small constant that first shows at depth 3.

Prism (Either carrier) — Option[Int] plus an Either[String, Int] Right-prism:

Iso (Direct carrier) — Address ↔ (String, String, String, String):

BijectionIso stores both directions as plain fields — same shape and direct-call hot path as Monocle's case class Iso. (Direct is now an opaque type; the wrap / unwrap at the carrier boundary are transparent inline identities, so the hot path is unchanged.)

Optional (Affine carrier) — leaf Option[String], composed through a Nested0..6 Lens chain via cross-carrier .andThen (the Morph[Tuple2, Affine] auto-lifts each hop):

At composition depth the per-hop cost stays low: modify_3 and modify_6 track the work of a hand-written nested copy with an Option match at the leaf, since the fused andThen composers are inline — each compose site splices distinct lambdas, so a deep chain doesn't reuse one shared andThen$$anonfun$ bytecode and trip C2's recursive-inline cap (before that, modify_6 was ~1.6× slower). Monocle lands a little behind here (modify_3 ~1.4×, modify_6 ~1.2×). Monocle is faster at the single-hit leaf (modify_0 / loyaltyId Some) — its Option-specialised internals shave the per-hit cost EO's generic Affine leaf carries to stay uniform across families. The loyaltyId rows are the canonical customer.loyaltyId: Option[String] focus (in memory — Avro omits it as a union), Some and None branches.

Getter / Modify (Direct / ModifyF) — depth-0/3/6 over Nested. Both families compose through the fused inline andThen on their concrete subclasses (Getter / Modify), so every row builds a composed optic on both sides and dispatches through it once — apples-to-apples with Monocle's composed Getter/Setter.

At composition depth both families stay close to the hand-written baseline — a depth-N chain of .get calls, or a nested copy for the modifier. The lever is inline on the same-carrier andThen: each compose site splices a distinct lambda, so a depth-N chain becomes distinct synthetic methods per level. A plain def reuses one shared andThen$$anonfun$ bytecode across the chain, which C2 reads as recursion and caps (MaxRecursiveInlineLevel), leaving the deep tail as virtual Function1.apply; splicing distinct lambdas sidesteps that cap with no JVM flag. Modify (benchmarked as SetterBench; Monocle's family is still Setter) additionally sheds its per-hop ModifyF allocation (the fused Modify writes through modifyFn directly: depth-6 800→288 B/op). Monocle gets the same un-capped inlining from a fresh anonymous class per compose, and trails here (~1.7–2.4× at _3/_6). Monocle is faster at the scalar leaf (_0, order.id) by a few tenths of a ns — the sub-nanosecond floor where its specialised case classes shave the last field load and EO's generic carrier does not.

Fold / Traversal — Fold foldMap(identity) over List[Int]; Traversal each.modify over the canonical Order.lines (bump each line's qty), sweeping size:

The hand-written reference is a bare foldLeft for the fold and an xs.map + copy for the traversal. Fold is on par with Monocle (0.98–1.06× across sizes) — both collapse to the same cats.Foldable[List].foldMap, one Monoid.combine per element, exactly what a hand-written foldMap does. EO's Fold.apply returns a concrete ForgetFold whose eager foldMap member folds straight through the captured Foldable[F] — the same stored-method shape as Monocle's Fold.fromFoldable. Before that specialisation EO routed every fold through the generic Optic.foldMap extension, and paid for it: ~5× at size 8 (109 → 20 ns), ~2.9× at 64, ~1.8× at 512. That overhead was a per-call constant (the ForgetfulFold[Forget[F]] summon, an intermediate S => M closure, and a box/unbox), not per-element — which is why it dominated small folds and faded into the asymptote on large ones. It was also invisible to -prof gc (the two were always allocation-identical at 14 080 B/op @512; escape analysis elides the closure, so the cost was cycles, not bytes — only CI's low-noise timing resolves it). The traversal is where the carriers genuinely diverge: EO's each (carrier MultiFocus[PSVec]) collects element references into a flat focus vector and rebuilds via Functor[PSVec].map, where Monocle wraps each element in Applicative[Id] — so EO tracks the hand-written map more closely and Monocle trails, widening to ~4.7× by 512 line items (each element pays a LineItem copy that dwarfs the carrier difference).

Integration: edit without decoding

The three integration benches share one realistic Order document — deep (customer.address.street, depth 3), wide (≥5 fields per level), and arrayed (lines) — so the JSON/Avro backends are directly comparable. Baselines per metric: eo (the cats-eo optic, plus the default Ior-bearing surface where it differs), naive (decode → copy → re-encode), monocle (decode → Monocle optic → encode), and backend-specific honest comparators (circe's hcursor / direct AST edits; jsoniter's hand-rolled partial-scan native).

The thesis, in one line: a pinpoint read/edit through cats-eo is flat in document size, while decode-modify-encode is linear — so the advantage is small on tiny payloads and enormous on large ones. The exception is whole-array work, where every approach must visit every element.

circe — JsonPrism / JsonTraversal over Json

Scalar deep edit, customer.address.street:

The edit is flat (~1.05 µs at any size); naive / monocle scale with the whole payload. direct JsonObject surgery is the fastest hand form (what JsonPrism mirrors); hcursor is competitive. On this scalar path the Ior surface is within noise of *Unsafe (≤~10 ns); the per-element Ior cost shows up only on the array traversal below.

Array write-traversal, lines[*].name:

Honest result: a whole-array rewrite is O(elements) for everyone, so the cursor walk has no structural edge — but EO's JsonTraversal now lands right on the hand-written cursor / AST forms (eo ≈ hcursor ≈ direct) and beats decode-modify-encode through Monocle, after the per-element path stopped re-allocating its walk state (JsonWalk uses flat index loops, not per-element Array→Vector/zip/foldRight). It still trails naive by ~1.1× at 512 — a bulk decode-map-encode is the most cache-friendly way to rewrite every element — so reach for JSON traversals for composition, diagnostics, and pinpoint edits, not raw whole-array throughput. (Avro below is the opposite, because its per-element decode is so costly.)

avro — AvroPrism / AvroTraversal over IndexedRecord

Scalar customer.address.street (loyaltyId is omitted — kindlings encodes Option as a union, navigated via .union[Branch]):

The flat-vs-linear story at its extreme: a field read is ~38 ns regardless of record size, a ~3 800× gap by 512 line items. Array write lines[*].name:

EO is ~5–7× faster than the hand-written decode-modify-encode even on a full-array write — Avro's per-element decode is costly enough that walking to the focused leaf and rebuilding one parent beats decoding every line item. (monocle here is that same round-trip, since Monocle has no IndexedRecord carrier.)

jsoniter — JsoniterPrism / JsoniterTraversal over Array[Byte]

native is a hand-rolled JsonReader that walks to the focus and skip()s every sibling — the optimum a jsoniter expert writes, which eo automates.

The byte-walk read is flat at ~199 ns; even the hand-rolled native scan scales (it tokenises everything it passes), so eo beats it ~4× at size 8 and pulls further ahead with size. The modify splice is O(bytes) so it grows mildly but stays ~57× under a re-encode. The fold must touch every element, so eo lands near native and only ~1.3× under naive.

eo-jsoniter vs eo-circe (the JsoniterBench cross-EO comparison, on the canonical Order swept over size 8/64/512, CI): eo-circe parses the whole document each call (circeParse then drill), so it is O(size); the eo-jsoniter byte-walk is flat. One-shot scalar read ($.id): jsoniter ~41 ns at every size vs circe 4 502 → 221 163 ns, a gap that grows from ~110× (size 8) to ~5 300× (512) as the parse cost climbs. .replace/.modify $.id: jsoniter 97 → 2 778 ns (O(bytes) splice) vs circe ~9 500 → 432 000 ns, ~95–155×. The array lines[*].price fold narrows to ~4.7× — both must visit every element. (A deliberately-absent $.customer.absent miss costs eo-jsoniter a flat ~182 ns; there is no honest circe peer, since a typed codec can't drill an absent field.) The design spike covers the carrier choice and splice mechanics.

PowerSeries traversal with downstream composition

Three composed-traversal chains. naive is the hand-written copy + map equivalent — the baseline that matters. monocle is the same composition built with Monocle (Lens.andThen(Traversal.fromTraverse).andThen(Lens), Traversal.andThen(Prism), nested traversals) — these compositions are first-class there too, so it's a fair peer. Traversal.each (carrier MultiFocus[PSVec]) is EO's vehicle for all three; a @Setup guard asserts the three paths agree.

Both eo and the hand-written naive track O(N). The test is per-element cost (ns ÷ element, traversing N leaves — 4N for the nested tree): once the fixed per-op setup amortises past the smallest N, it flattens to a constant.

A least-squares fit on log(time) vs log(N) gives slopes of 0.9–1.0 for every eo and naive series (a slope of 1 is exact linearity; the dip below 1 is the small-N fixed cost, which makes the curve concave — i.e. it rules out super-linear growth, not linearity). Error bars are ≤3.4% on all eo/naive points, so the flattening is signal, not noise. The eo ÷ naive overhead settles at ~2–3× on the dense Lens and nested chains and ~5× on the sparse Prism (whose miss branch carries inherent per-element plumbing). monocle is shown for reference; its scaling on the shared runner is noisier and not characterised here.

Under the hood the carrier pairs an existential leftover with a flat PSVec focus vector (Array[AnyRef] + an (offset, length) window), and two internal singleton markers (MultiFocusSingleton for always-hit Lens morphs, MultiFocusPSMaybeHit for maybe-miss Prism/Optional morphs) let the hot path write directly into pre-sized builders instead of allocating a per-element wrapper. The full mechanics and the −59 %…−67 % optimisation history are in the composition notes.

Plated recursion — read (universe) + write (transform) vs a hand visitor (and Monocle)

PlatedBench measures cats-eo's Plated against the hand-written recursion ("visitor") you'd write without optics — the baseline that matters — with Monocle's monocle.function.Plated alongside for reference, over three subjects: a normal-depth Expr tree, a degenerate deep Bin spine, and a normal-depth circe Json tree (via the universal Plated[Json]). The Plated carrier is PSVec-native, so neither path converts to a List and back.

(ns/op at n=512, from the reproducible CI benchmarks workflow — 3-fork on the shared runner, so absolute numbers run higher than a quiet desktop; the ratios are the signal and sub-~1.5× differences aren't meaningful. SO = StackOverflowError.)

Three results:

• universe rivals the hand-written visitor. Reading children straight off the PSVec carrier (no List round-trip, explicit worklist) puts the JSON subject ~1.5× the bare visitor and Expr within ~2× — close to the recursion you'd write by hand, while staying composable through .andThen. (Monocle is ~10–15× slower here, its lazy-#::: append going quadratic, and is not stack-safe: both universe and transform StackOverflowError on the degenerate spine at depth ≳2048. EO clears the spine at every size here and at 100k in the stack-safety test, so the deep rows compare EO against the visitor only.)
• transform sits within ~2–3× of the hand-written visitor and is stack-safe. It went from an Eval trampoline (was ~10× slower) to a hybrid: a direct call-stack recursion (≈ a hand-written rebuild — no per-node heap Frame) while shallow, handing any subtree past a depth bound to the heap-stack machine so a degenerate spine still can't overflow. (rewrite keeps its own cats.Eval trampoline — it stays stack-safe on both the descent and a long re-fire chain, which a synchronous machine would put back on the call stack.) With childrenVec / rebuild (no to/from tuple per node) and leaves applied in place, allocation is ~80 B/node on Expr (visitor is 44) and ~56 B/node on the deep spine. Both paths sit within ~2–3× of the bare visitor.

The residual gap to the visitor is the carrier materialisation: even on the fast recursive path EO allocates a PSVec of children + an out array per internal node, where a hand visitor fuses extract-and-rebuild into one new Node(go(l), go(r)) and allocates neither — plus the heap stack the deep fallback uses (so it never overflows; the visitor and Monocle both do on the spine). Closing the last ~2–3× would mean fusing the recursion into the plate[S] macro — but that emits a function, not an Optic, which would break the .andThen composition everywhere relies on, so it's deliberately not done.

Reproducing

The integration tables are produced by the Benchmarks CI workflow (.github/workflows/benchmarks.yml, manual workflow_dispatch) — it uploads a jmh-results.json artifact and renders a summary table to the run page.

Locally, the bench / benchQuick sbt aliases bake in the standard config (append a JMH filter to scope):

sbt bench                          # -f 3 -wi 3 -i 5, whole suite
sbt "bench .*OrderAvroBench.*"     # one class
sbt benchQuick                     # -f 1 -wi 2 -i 3, fast + noisy

GC and stack profilers help when a number is surprising:

sbt "bench -prof gc .*LensBench.*"
sbt "bench -prof stack .*PowerSeries.*"