Difference between revisions of "Performance/Strings"
DonStewart (talk | contribs) (typo) |
DonStewart (talk | contribs) (Rewrite the last case, which made me notice a space leak in Data.ByteString, and an inefficient algorithm) |
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<haskell> |
<haskell> |
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− | import qualified Data. |
+ | import qualified Data.ByteString as P |
+ | import Maybe |
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import IO |
import IO |
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− | main = |
+ | main = P.readFile "/usr/share/dict/words" >>= P.putStrLn . snd . fromJust . P.breakLast '\n' |
− | putChar '\n' |
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</haskell> |
</haskell> |
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Revision as of 13:41, 24 April 2006
Haskell Performance Resource
Constructs: Techniques: |
Strings
Sometimes the cost of representing strings as lists of Char can be too much. In this case, you can instead use packed strings. There are a number of options:
- The standard Data.PackedString type
- One of the newer packed string libraries, for example FastPackedString
- Unboxed arrays of Word8 or Char
- Ptrs to foreign malloced Word8 buffers
The packed string libraries have the benefit over arrays of Word8 or Char types, in that they provide the usual list-like operations.
Some interesting results for FastPackedString are documented here. In particular, it compares FPS against the existing PackedString and [Char] functions, and is used successfully with 1 gigabyte strings.
Example
Pete Chown asked the question:
I want to read a text file. As an example, let's use /usr/share/dict/words and try to print out the last line of the file.
The python version completes in around 0.05s.
Attempt 1 : [Char]
import System.IO
main = readFile "/usr/share/dict/words" >>= putStrLn.last.lines
Run in hugs, this program took several seconds to complete. Problem: interpreted (solution, use a Haskell compiler). Compiled, the program completes in a fairly quick 0.2s. Still, we can do better.
Attempt 2 : Packed Strings
Using fast, packed strings, we get:
import qualified Data.FastPackedString as P
import IO
main = P.readFile "/usr/share/dict/words" >>= P.hPut stdout . last . P.lines
Runs in 0.063s
Attempt 3 : No Lists
Avoid splitting the file into lists at all, and just keep a single buffer (as a C programmer would perhaps do):
import qualified Data.ByteString as P
import Maybe
import IO
main = P.readFile "/usr/share/dict/words" >>= P.putStrLn . snd . fromJust . P.breakLast '\n'
Runs in 0.013s
Related work
An extended tutorial on using PackedStrings/ByteStrings for high performance string manipulating code is here.