Re: [Caml-list] The fastest stream library [Was: Question about

[Oleg <oleg@okmij.org>]

Gabriel wrote:

> I regret not being pointed to this work earlier, because I think that
> measuring the performance of Enum as a representative OCaml stream library
> performance is not the best choice : Enum is designed to be flexible in a
> bit too many ways to be efficient on pure-streaming scenarios (it supports
> a generic "clone", and effectful generators, that makes the codebase too
> complex for its own good; I think that Batteries community is aware that
> Enum is not as good as it should be right now). There are other, more
> efficient streaming libraries out there, including BatSeq in Batteries that
> should already be sensibly faster; Core and Containers also have more
> efficient streaming libraries.

Please do note that we make the double claim: wide expressivity *and*
guaranteed highest performance. We support not just the standard map and
filter, but zipping of streams with flat_maps in them, with both
finite and infinite streams. So we do want generality. From this
point, Enum was quite an appropriate.

Speaking of benchmarks, the real point of comparison is the
hand-written code for each benchmark, written with imperative loops,
references, etc. (We admit that some of that on several occasions
the hand-written baseline code was fine-tuned when it turned out that the
generated code outperformed it.) Please do feel free to suggest faster
versions.