[erlang-questions] N-Queens

[David Hopwood]

Mikael Pettersson wrote:
> Serge Aleynikov writes:
>  > Greetings!
>  > 
>  > I wrote an N-Queen problem solver in C/C++/OCaml/Erlang for conducting a 
>  > benchmarking exercise.  Here are results:
>  > 
>  > $ wc -l nqueens.{c,cpp,ml,erl}
>  >    93 nqueens.c
>  >   109 nqueens.cpp
>  >    61 nqueens.ml
>  >    61 nqueens.erl
>  > 
>  > On my host timing is as follows:
>  > 
>  > $ make run   # 8 queens, 1000 times
>  > # Program               Time
>  > ./queens_c:             0.96
>  > ./queens_cpp:           1.16
>  > ./queens_ml:            0.77     # OCaml natively compiled
>  > ./queens_ml.bcode:      22.55    # OCaml bytecode compiled
>  > nqueens.beam:           8.56
>  > 
>  > Note that Erlang code is natively compiled.  Without the native flag it 
>  > gives about the same time as queens_ml.bcode.
>  > 
>  > If we use optimization (-O3 for C/C++ and -unsafe for OCaml) the timing 
>  > picture is slightly different.
>  > 
>  > I am curious if anyone can suggest any improvement to nqueens.erl 
>  > (preserving the algorithm) that would increase its performance (other 
>  > that parallelization).
> 
> Both the C/C++ and O'Caml versions use mutable arrays and omit
> runtime safety checks, while the Erlang version is using tuples
> and runtime type and index checks. Apples and oranges...

The O'Caml version that takes 0.77 seconds is not omitting runtime safety
checks. The time for O'Caml compiled with -unsafe was not given.

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood@REDACTED>