OCaml Bigarray: slower than builtin arrays?

multidimensional-array, ocaml

Solution

Just based on looking through the implementations, I'd say that bigarrays might be slower if you create large numbers of short-lived arrays. It looks like the memory for them is managed outside the usual OCaml GC, which handles short-lived objects extremely well.

You also might find that accesses to bigarrays aren't inlined, whereas accesses to the built-in arrays would be.

On the other hand, built-in arrays are going to have an extra indirection for two-dimensions.

If the performance really matters, you'll probably have to benchmark your particular application.

Problem

Original source