I have a Delphi app that shows al integers form 0-100,000 in a listbox and the numbers that are prime are shown in a second listbox. Calculation speed Delphi 1.9 sec. In Xojo I have the same app, and the calculation time is 46 secs.
Heavy lifting of the calculation is done by IsPrime function:
In Delphi/Pascal:
function IsPrime(X: Integer):Boolean;
begin
if (X <= 1) then Exit(False);
var Q := Floor(Sqrt(X));
for var i := 2 to Q do
if (X Mod I = 0) then
Exit(False);
Exit(True);
end;
In Xojo:
Public Function IsPrime(X as Integer) As Boolean
If (X <= 1) Then
Return False
End If
Var Q As Double = Floor(Sqrt(X))
For I As Integer = 2 To Q
If (X Mod I = 0) Then
Return False
Else
Return True
End If
Next
End Function
The app fills the listbox in a for/next loop and tests every integer (which is not necessary, could do with only odds). Delphi:
procedure TForm4.OKClick(Sender: TObject);
var
I: Integer;
SW: TStopwatch;
begin
SW := TStopwatch.StartNew;
for I := 0 to 100000 do
begin
NumListBox.Items.Add(IntToStr(i));
if IsPrime(i) then PrimeListBox.Items.Add(IntToStr(i));
end;
ShowMessage('Time: ' + FormatDateTime('hh:nn:ss:zzz',sw.ElapsedMilliseconds/MSecsPerDay));
end;
Xojo:
Dim start As Double = System.Ticks
Var TotalNumbers As Integer = 100000
For i As Integer = 0 To TotalNumbers
NumListBox.AddRow(Str(I))
If IsPrime(I) Then
PrimeListBox.AddRow(Str(I))
End If
Next
Var elapsedSeconds As Double = (Ticks - start) / 60
MessageBox("Time: " + elapsedSeconds.ToString)
Your Xojo function appears to include many non-primes such as 25, 33, 45, 49. This could be part of the problem.
But I agree with other replies - you’re testing 2 different things (calculation of primes and adding items to a list) and adding the times together.
There are other posts in this forum about list boxes with a lot of rows. There can be performance problems. And for a real application, how is a user going to navigate through 100000 items?
Dim start As Double = System.Ticks
Var TotalNumbers As Integer = 100000
NumListBox.RemoveAllRows
PrimeListBox.RemoveAllRows
Var TempNum(-1) As String
Var TempPrime(-1) As String
For i As Integer = 0 To TotalNumbers
TempNum.AddRow(Str(I))
If IsPrime(I) Then
TempPrime.AddRow(Str(I))
End If
Next
NumListBox.AddRows(TempNum)
PrimeListBox.AddRows(TempPrime)
Var elapsedSeconds As Double = (Ticks - start) / 60
MessageBox("Time: " + elapsedSeconds.ToString)
Your isPrime function is buggy. The Delphi code does return true after the loop. Try this:
Public Function isPrime(x as Integer) As Boolean
If (X <=1) Then
Return False
End If
Var Q As Double = Floor(Sqrt(X))
For I As Integer = 2 To Q
If (X Mod I = 0) Then
Return False
End If
Next
Return True
End Function
Yes indeed! Thanks for mentioning. With the bug fixed I and skipping the listboxes I get the same results in prime count and calculation speed is better now: Xojo is 0.41667 sec and Delphi 0.009 sec. Still a huge difference.
Adding to a listbox can add considerable time. I have a high-speed CSV parser with a test app that will show the parsed CSV in a listbox for inspection. On a 150MB input file, parsing 3,173,959 rows and adding to the listbox takes 76.45sec, while just parsing and not adding them takes 49.97sec, an over 50% increase in time. That said, we are talking about over 3 million rows, so that’s not too bad.
And here is my outer loop where the timing is just the loop without the output. It should be better to compare. Also I use Microseconds instead of Ticks.
Dim dTime As Double = System.Microseconds
dim primes() as Integer
For i As Integer = 0 To 100000
If IsPrime(I) Then
primes.Append i
End If
Next
dTime = (System.Microseconds - dTime) / 1000
for each prime as integer in primes
PrimeListBox.AddRow(Str(prime))
next
self.Title = "Time: " + dTime.ToString + " ms"
PS. I set the window title because I don’t like the MessageBox
Thanks! That gives 408 millisecs and the population of the listbox is very speedy. Or is it microsecs. It should be about 0.5 sec so 408 should be millisecs though.
In Delphi you can actually speed up the calculation by using the parallel library
var
Tot: Integer;
SW: TStopwatch;
begin
try
// counts the prime numbers below a given value
Tot :=0;
SW :=TStopWatch.Create;
SW.Start;
TParallel.For(2,1,Max,procedure(I:Int64)
begin
if IsPrime(I) then
TInterlocked.Increment(Tot);
end);
SW.Stop;
Memo1.Lines.Add(Format(‘Parallel For loop. Time (in milliseconds): %d - Primes found: %d’, [SW.ElapsedMilliseconds,Tot]));
except on E:EAggregateException do
ShowMessage(E.ToString);
end;
end;
That’s because Delphi does not have a framework like Xojo. So .exe are very small, just like VS C++
Delphi was pretty great and probably the best RAD tool ever made. But after Borland did let it go (after bankruptcy?) it wend down hill.
A very good friend of mine (Didier Dambrin) here in Brussels made the very well known Fruityloops with Delphi, which is now known as FL-Studio. Lately also ported to macOS with Delphi.
I tested this on a MacBook Pro 2.8 GHz i7 with 16 GB RAM and Xojo 2021r3.1. In all test variations I collect the values and set each ListBox once using AddRows per MarkusR’s suggestion. This results in a UI refresh time of ~0.035s. All times below are for the processing only. So the total time would be processing + 0.035s.
Using TomE’s corrected IsPrime function…
Debugger: 0.498s
Debugger with Matthew Combatti’s suggested pragmas: 0.387s
Compiled aggressive with pragmas: 0.095s
So using the pragmas and compiling on aggressive makes a big difference.
Using the Sieve of Eratosthenes against a boolean array, compiled aggressive with pragmas, I get 0.072s processing time. If I compute to 1,000,000 instead of 100,000 the sieve algorithm scales by 10 to 0.723s. But the IsPrime function doesn’t scale as well with a processing time of 1.255s.
For comparison, using Sieve of Eratosthenes in C against a char array, Xcode 11, the processing time is 0.000197.
