2
votes
0answers
97 views

Is there documentation on the comparative performance of Mathematica functions?

Recently I have been solving some Project Euler problems. I find there are always several ways to do the same thing. For example, one could join two lists like this: ...
5
votes
1answer
93 views

Does pass-by-value affect the performance of function calls?

I only have a little coding experience in C, and I remember I was told that pass by reference is more efficient than pass by value since the parameters don't need to be copied. Since there is no pass ...
8
votes
1answer
230 views

Optimizing the performance of an algorithm

First - a bit of an introduction. If you're only interested in the code, you can skip this section. The following question is drawn from Dennis E. Shasha's Puzzling Adventures, and is listed under ...
5
votes
1answer
189 views

Can we know the background code associated with basic mathematica functions

I wanted to know how computers calculate basic functions like Sqrt so first I checked how humans do it I found that they use something called "Newton's method" that ...
8
votes
1answer
384 views

GeoDirection and GeoDistance Memory Leaks: How to Recover the Memory?

The functions GeoDirection and GeoDistance have memory leaks. To see this, run the example functions below and watch as the Physical Memory Available in the Windows Task Manager, Performance tab, ...
7
votes
3answers
216 views

Making sure that Timing[] isn't thrown off by caching

In playing with and comparing the various answers to my question here, I tried applying Timing[] to see how fast things ran, but it seemed that some of the answers ...
11
votes
1answer
179 views

Choosing among different function definitions without sacrificing speed

I'm working on some code that numerically integrates a function, let's call it G, which calls another function, F, that can be ...