Sunday 6 November 2011

Exploring Scala Collections

This weekend I've been trying to write some microbenchmarks and discovered a large differences between different implements of the same problem: create a list of 10 million objects and print only the ones that are modulo of a million.

This is the code in question. It runs in 141 milliseconds requiring no more than 27 mbs JVM (the smallest i could create).



As shown in this StackOverFlow question, a range followed by a filter operation can even beat the performance of an array of primitives in Java. The space required is smaller, and the amount of time to execute it is barely comparable, whereas any other approach was in between one and two orders of magnitude worse, depending the case.


I learnt several things with this simple exercise, from Ranges, Array (compile to primitives, no need for Wrappers), and performance monitoring.