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?)