[Openmcl-devel] To sqrt or to expt, that is the question

[Gary King]

Oh my gawd, that _was_ silly of me. Thanks for your patience. Ugh!

On Dec 22, 2003, at 11:08 PM, Gary Byers wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, 22 Dec 2003, Gary King wrote:
>
>> I was looking at some code where someone had used expt to compute the
>> square root of a number. "Hmm, I thought, it all depends on the
>> compiler and the implementation, but I would have thought that (sqrt 
>> x)
>> would be faster than (expt x 0.5)." So I tried the following,
>> admittedly unscientific, test:
>>
>> (time
>>   (let ((x 0d0))
>>     (loop repeat 100000 do
>>           (setf x (expt 101 0.5)))
>>     x))
>>
>> (time
>>   (let ((x 0d0))
>>     (loop repeat 100000 do
>>           (setf x (sqrt 101)))
>>     x))
>>
>> To my surprise in both MCL and OpenMCL, not only was expt faster, but
>> sqrt conses. Note that I tried the same test in SBCL and found that
>> there was no significant difference between expt and sqrt. This
>> probably isn't a big deal, but it might be worth optimizing sqrt in 
>> MCL
>> at some point...
>> --
>> Gary Warren King, Lab Manager
>> EKSL East, University of Massachusetts * 413 577 0176
>
> Boy, this optimization stuff is easy!  I don't know why everyone says
> otherwise:
>
> ? (progn (ccl::can-constant-fold '(sqrt)) nil)
> NIL
>
>
> For those who aren't amused by sarcasm: no, I don't remember why
> SQRT isn't known to be constant-foldablle by default; doing so would
> clearly make programs that call SQRT on constants run faster and (with
> a straight face) I'd agree that there might really be some such 
> programs
> (or macros might expand into code like this), and there's no good 
> reason
> -not- to constant-fold SQRT at compile-time. (I would guess that the
> decision to not constant-fold SQRT calls was made - if it was made
> consciously at all - at a time when cons cells were seen as being
> in short supply.)
>
> Also with a straight face: there -are- cases where CMUCL/SBCL generate
> better numeric code than MCL/OpenMCL.  Whether it's any better in the
> case of SQRT or not is hard to say: that may depend on what's known
> about the type and sign of SQRT's argument and may also depend on
> whether (floating-point) SQRT's implmented in hardware on a given
> platform, whether library routines for all floating point types are
> available, how much overhead's involved in a foreign function call
> and why, etc.
>
> Unlike other PPC variants. the G5 does implement the "optional" FSQRT
> instruction, which suggests that there might be some cases where the
> compiler could do something better than a function call for SQET.  Even
> if this were implemented, I think that your example clearly shows that
> it's much better to do SQRT at compile tome than at run time, and I
> hope that you'll forgive me for not keeping a straight face for three
> whole paragraphs.
>
> (spoken as someone who's raised the alarm prematurely from time to time
> myself.)
>
> Gary Byers
> gb at clozure.com
>
>
-- 
Gary Warren King, Lab Manager
EKSL East, University of Massachusetts * 413 577 0176

A short memory is a great boon to self esteem.
   -- Steve Chapman, columnist