Re: Factor

A recent blog post discusses the relative performance between Haskell and C when calculating the billionth iteration of a particular logistic map function:

f(x) = 3.57 * x * (1-x)

A bit curious about how Factor would perform, I decided to do a comparison.

C

A simple implementation in C…

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    double x = 0.5;
    for(int i = 0; i < 1000000000; ++i){
        x = 3.57 * x * (1-x);
    }
    printf("x=%f\n", x);
}

…yields an answer in about 4.5 seconds on my machine:

$ time ./answer
x=0.495618

real 0m4.501s
user 0m4.495s
sys 0m0.005s

Factor

A simple implementation in Factor…

: logistic-chaos ( x -- y )
    [ 3.57 * ] [ 1 swap - * ] bi ; inline

: answer ( -- n )
    0.5 1,000,000,000 [ logistic-chaos ] times ;

…yields an answer in about 4.5 seconds on my machine!

IN: scratchpad [ answer ] time .
Running time: 4.478111574 seconds

0.4956180832934247

Note: Part of the speed comes from the Factor compiler using the inline request to determine that this is always called with floating point numbers. If the word was not inlined, the overhead of generic dispatch on every call would make this calculation take 19 seconds. If the calculation was not compiled into a word (as it is above), and just typed into the listener and executed with the non-optimizing compiler, the calculation would take 57 seconds.