Julia performs badly for a single Mandlebrot creation
On fortran90.org is a “Python Fortran Rosetta Stone”
page with a Mandelbrot
Set code comparison. I’m still learning Julia, so I tried to code a
similar short program using Julia.
Maybe I did something wrong… but for me, Julia took more CPU time, more memory, and more code verbosity than the Python example. For array masking, even Fortran was less verbose than Julia. Note that array masking is buildin for Numpy and Fortran; I did not try MaskedArrays.jl so probably the Julia code can be made less verbose, although that adds another dependency. I doubt if time and memory consumption can be brought down.
| Language | user | system | elapsed | %CPU | maxresident(k) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fortran | 0.03 | 0.01 | 0:00.05 | 94 | 34280 |
| Python | 2.47 | 0.03 | 0:02.53 | 99 | 121848 |
| Julia | 3.94 | 0.20 | 0:04.10 | 100 | 503796 |
I did change the original code from fortran90.org a bit
to make the algorithms even more similar (comparable). Below, the code
is shown as an image with a few comments – I hope you have a wide
monitor. All my files, code, scripts and whatnot are available as
download: mandelbrot_comparison.zip
The very friendly people in the Discord chat channel “Humans of Julia” made a few comments on my code, so I could learn and improve. Thansk guys! (Updated code below the picture.) Also see this gist!
mandelbrot_improved.jl
include("functions.jl")
# Const and type declarations didn't do much to make the code speedier,
# but they added a lot of verbosity to the code, so I removed those again.
ITERATIONS = 100
DENSITY = 1000
x_min, x_max = -2.68, 1.32
y_min, y_max = -1.5, 1.5
x,y = meshgrid(LinRange(x_min, x_max, DENSITY), LinRange(y_min, y_max, DENSITY))
c = x + (y)im
z = copy(c)
fractal = fill(255,DENSITY,DENSITY)
mask = [abs(α) ≤ 10 for α in z] # initial fill
# for loop contents improved by devin.jl
for n in 1:ITERATIONS
println("Iteration ", n)
@. mask = abs(z) ≤ 10
z[mask] .^= 2
z[mask] .+= c[mask]
@. fractal[abs(z) > 10 && fractal == 255] = 254 * (n-1) ÷ ITERATIONS
end
logfractal = log.(fractal) #devin.jl
println("Saving...")
savetxt("fractal_jl.dat", logfractal)
savetxt("coord_jl.dat", [ x_min, x_max, y_min, y_max ] )functions.jl
# meshgrid function by Chris Rackauckas, 2016
# https://groups.google.com/g/julia-users/c/83Pfg9HGhGQ/m/9G_0wi-GBQAJ
function meshgrid(a,b)
x = a' .* ones(length(b))
y = ones(length(a))' .* b
return x,y
end
# stylistic improvement by Jacob
savetxt(filename, array) = open(filename) do io
for row in eachrow(array)
line = replace(string(row), "[" => "", "]" => "", "," => "")
println(io, line)
end
end