[Haskell-cafe] Haskell version of ray tracer code is much slower than the original ML

[Spencer Janssen]

On Thu, 21 Jun 2007 11:55:04 +0100
Philip Armstrong <phil at kantaka.co.uk> wrote:

> In odd spare moments, I took John Harrops simple ray tracer[1] & made
> a Haskell version:
> 
>   http://www.kantaka.co.uk/cgi-bin/darcsweb.cgi?r=ray
> 
>   darcs get http://www.kantaka.co.uk/darcs/ray
> 
> It's pretty much a straight translation into idiomatic Haskell (as far
> as my Haskell is idiomatic anyway).
> 
> Unfortunately, it's a lot slower than the ML version, despite turning
> all the optimisation options up as far as they'll go. Profiling
> suggests that much of the time is spent in the intersection' function,
> and that the code is creating (and garbage collecting) an awful lot of
> (-|) vector subtraction thunks. Trying to make intersection' or
> ray_sphere stricter (with seq) appears to have no effect whatsoever:
> the output of -ddump-simpl is unchanged (with the arguments all
> staying lazy).
> 
> Am I missing anything obvious? I don't want to carry out herculean
> code rewriting efforts: that wouldn't really be in the spirit of the
> thing.
> 
> cheers, Phil
> 
> [1] http://www.ffconsultancy.com/languages/ray_tracer/comparison.html
> 

With a very minor change (attached), your Haskell ray tracer runs faster
than the OCaml version on my machine.  There's a bug GHC where it does
not recognize -fexcess-precision at the command line, but an
OPTIONS_GHC pragma does work correctly.  This flag brings runtime from
about 60s to 20s on my machine (Core Duo 1.83GHz) -- compared to 25s
for the OCaml version.

Results (each run twice to avoid OS buffering of the executable):

% uname -a
Linux localhost 2.6.22-rc4 #5 SMP Tue Jun 19 17:29:36 CDT 2007 i686
Genuine Intel(R) CPU T2400 @ 1.83GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
% ghc --version
The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 6.6
% ocamlopt -version
3.09.3
% (time ./hsray) | md5sum
./hsray  20.23s user 0.03s system 98% cpu 20.536 total
63a359e5c388f2004726d83d4337f56b  -
% (time ./hsray) | md5sum
./hsray  19.74s user 0.07s system 99% cpu 19.907 total
63a359e5c388f2004726d83d4337f56b  -
% (time ./mlray) | md5sum  
./mlray  25.55s user 0.00s system 98% cpu 25.831 total
63a359e5c388f2004726d83d4337f56b  -
% (time ./mlray) | md5sum
./mlray  25.63s user 0.04s system 98% cpu 25.981 total
63a359e5c388f2004726d83d4337f56b  -


Cheers,
Spencer Janssen
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