In case anyone is interested, comparative timings over 100000000 runs
Based on comparing integers (500 and 501)
Spaceship:4
()?: operator:10
Subtraction:2
Based on comparing floats (500.1 and 501.3) (caveats noted)
Spaceship:5
()?: operator:9
Subtraction:3
Based on comparing strings ("five" and "four")
Spaceship:7
()?: operator:17
(Subtraction obviously not available)
Note: a dummy run was done with an empty loop and the elapsed time for this was subtracted from each of the above times so that they reflect ONLY the time to do the comparisons. As for significance. unless you are doing very large numbers of comparisons where spaceships are the order of the day, the difference is insignificant.
