Last year, I gave a talk at the Conj on my attempt to write an AI for the board game Go. Two things I discovered is that it was hard to get predictable performance, but even once I made sure I had all the right type hints, there was still a lot of room at the bottom for performance improvements. Towards the end [1], I mentioned a few ideas for improvements, one of which was simply using ByteBuffers rather than objects to host the data. This would remove all the levels of indirection, giving much better cache coherency, and also allow for fast unsynchronized mutability when the situation called for it.
So, ten months and several supporting libraries [2] [3] later, here it is: https://github.com/ztellman/vertigo At a high level, this library is useful whenever your datatype has a fixed layout and is used more than once. Depending on your type, it will give you moderate to large memory savings, and if you're willing to forgo some of core library in favor of Vertigo's operators, you can get significant performance gains on batch operations. And, in the cases where performance doesn't matter, it will behave exactly like any other Clojure data structure. I want to point out that something like this would be more or less impossible in Java; reading from an offset in a ByteBuffer without the compile-time inference and validation provided by this library would be pointlessly risky. There's not a lot of low-level Clojure libraries, but there's an increasing amount of production usage where people are using Clojure for performance-sensitive work. I'm looking forward to seeing what people do with Vertigo and libraries like it. Zach [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=v5dYE0CMmHQ#t=1828s [2] https://github.com/ztellman/primitive-math [3] https://github.com/ztellman/byte-streams -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
