]> > I was wondering what are the relative merits (in terms of speed, > portability and ease of use) between using arrays of arrays, and the > BigArray class. > > While web browsing, I saw a couple of people claim that BigArray is > signigicantly slower than the standard array class: > > http://caml.inria.fr/archives/200105/msg00217.html > claims BigArray is 3 times slower > > www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs612/2001sp/ projects/ocaml-arrays/OCaml.pd > claims BigArray is about 10 times slower There are earlier discussions of this issue in the archives of the caml-list. See for instance my reply: http://pauillac.inria.fr/bin/wilma_hiliter/caml-list/200207/msg00445.html In general, bigarrays are slower than regular arrays, although the slowdown depends a lot on how the code is written, e.g. ensuring that bigarrays are fully monomorphic improves performance quite a lot. The main purpose of bigarrays is not to speed up pure Caml code, but to facilitate interfacing with external numerical libraries. In some circumstances, bigarrays have a few added bonuses as well: compact representation of arrays of small floats, small integers, and complex numbers; support for dimensions >= 2^22 on 32-bit machines; and no-copying slicing and shrinking operations. But all this comes at some expense in speed for raw array accesses. > Plus an interface to some standard linear algebra code would be nice... You mean, like LACAML? http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/~markus/home/ocaml_sources.html - Xavier Leroy ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners