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On 31/08/2011 11.32, TNHarris wrote:
Lorenzo Donati<lorenzodonatibz@interfree.it>  wrote:

According to the following benchmarks, built-in math.floor and
math.ceil
are slower than their counterpart rewritten using the core % operator!

Partly because you're measuring table lookups. Alias math.floor and math.ceil to locals and the times I get go from 40% slower to just 25% slower.

Ouch! Silly me! I knew that!

My code is "littered" by local foo = lib.foo statements! :-)

My original benchmark did have locals. I did that mistake when pulling it out of context in order to post it :-(



Also, that ce2 function is wrong when x%1 equals 0.


Uh! Right. I was too hasty.

Let's try again:

----------------------------------------------
local StatTime = require 'ld.debug'.StatTime

local floor = math.floor
local ceil = math.ceil

local function flo( x ) return floor( x ) end
local function flo2( x ) return x - x%1 end

local function ce( x ) return ceil( x ) end
local function ce2( x )
   local fp = x%1
   if fp == 0 then return x end
   return x - fp + 1
end


print( StatTime( 1e8, { flo, flo2 }, 5.5 ) )
  --> 2.275e-007	1	0.675
print( StatTime( 1e8, { ce, ce2 }, 5.5 ) )
  --> 2.3765e-007	1	0.745
----------------------------------------------


Still quite slower.


BTW I was contacted by PM and I got this objection:

[...]
Your function "flo2" calculates the
floor of a number. But the function "flo" calls another function which
then calculates the floor. That is adding an extra function call to
"flo", which distorts the benchmark. You should compare the two
functions which calculate floor directly, i.e, math.floor on the one
hand and your function flo2 on the other.

Instead of this
    print(StatTime(1e8,{ flo, flo2 }, 5.5))
    print(StatTime(1e8,{ ce, ce2 }, 5.5))

Try this
    print(StatTime(1e8,{ math.floor, flo2 }, 5.5))
    print(StatTime(1e8,{ math.ceil, ce2 }, 5.5))

and you will see that the bult in functions are indeed faster.
[...]

But I don't think this objection is correct, since I did it on purpose to wrap floor and ceil in flo and ce, in order to compare them on par with flo2 and ce2, because I wanted to compare them against the idioms
using %, not to an hypothetical reimplementation of ceil and floor using %.

And so it seems that my conclusion is valid: there is no advantage in using floor and ceil instead of using % directly, except when readability is important (admittedly most of the times when one is using Lua and not LuaJIT).

Anyway this is a big gotcha, IMHO: one wouldn't expect that a library function would be slower than a do-it-yourself alternative.

But the question about "useless fat" in Lua remains: why then log10 was dropped and ceil and floor remain? It's only a matter of statistical relevance? (I suppose that most people use floor and ceil much more often than log10). I remember Lua team, replying to people complaining about the missing log10 that they could roll their own. Why floor and ceil are so special?


thanks!
-- Lorenzo


P.S.: has anyone given a look at my benchmarking function? I hope I didn't do something too stupid there (especially with the collectgarbage sequence etc.)