Calcpad version 5.9.3

[Proektsoftbg]

1. Various bugs with code editing, highlighting and undo were fixed. Mostly with macros.
2. Synchronization of scrolling was added for files with macros and modules.

• If you double click on a line or press ctrl+Enter in the code editor the output will scroll to match the respective lines;
• line numbers of the unwrapped code are now links. If you click any, you will find the matching source line in the original code.

4. Performance was improved with another 15%-20%. This is achieved by optimizing function calling.

After all the optimizations in the last 2-3 months, Calcpad now performs almost as twice as faster than version 5.8.6 from Sept 2022.

I made a short video that demonstrates this: https://youtu.be/6hPCa4qh2YQ

---

This discussion was created from the release Calcpad version 5.9.3.

[Proektsoftbg]

Is Calcpad faster than MathCAD? That is an interesting question.

I tried one and the same expression in both programs, summed 100 000 000 times.
It included simple arithmetic operations with units. The result is that MathCAD took 2-3 times longer to complete!!!

Gravar.1.mp4

This is great news, having in mind that MathCAD is one of the world most popular applications for engineering calculations. It has been developed for decades and now owned by one of the most powerful companies for engineering software. I will do some more tests with numerical methods and other features to see what happens there.

[Proektsoftbg]

@hildebrandopsj , can you please do this test also with SMath:

n = 100000000
$Sum{i*m + i*dm + i*cm + i*mm @ i = 1 : n}

It is interesting to know where the competition is? ;)

[Proektsoftbg]

Here is a test for numerical integration - sqrt(1 - x^2) integrated 2 000 000 times. I could say that MathCAD and Calcpad are quite competitive. Although that TOL in MathCAD cannot be greater than 10^-7 and I used 10^-12 in Calcpad, the results are very close.

Calcpad.vs.Mathcad.Integration.mp4

[Proektsoftbg]

Hi guys,

I made another performance test, but this time with SMath. I used the same example as for the MathCAD test:

$Sum{i*m + i*dm + i*cm + i*mm @ i = 1 : n}

But the difference was so huge that it was very difficult to record a decent video.
For any value around and bellow n = 1 000 000, Calcpad finished almost instantly without any noticeable delay. But SMath took more than a minute for n = 1 000 000 and about 20 seconds for n = 500 000. So I recorded this one:

Calcpad.vs.SMath.mp4

Of course, I also tried n = 100 000 000 as in the MathCAD example. It took about 10 secs for Calcpad and 20 secs for MathCAD. For SMath, I waited up to 20 minutes and finally gave up.

I think that the difference comes mainly from the smart mix between interpreted and compiled code + optimizations (dynamic programming, caching, constant folding etc.) that Calcpad uses. I believe that MathCAD is optimized in a similar way. Probably, SMath interprets the same code each time, which is very slow. Unfortunately, it is not open source.

On the other hand, Calcpad interprets only codes that will be executed just once and compiles those that are to be executed multiple times as the one inside the sum. The compilations is lazy - on demand (occurs when the code is needed for the first time).

I even consider to compile the whole code and write it as an executable. It can be wrapped in a thin Calcpad "player" that will provide the interface to run, print and export the results. For that purpose, it will look and work exactly as in the main app, but will be standalone and will not require to have Calcpad installed.

There are opportunities for even further optimization - parallelization, SIMD vectorization and using CUDA cores (if a suitable video card is available). But I think that it is time to add some more useful features, so this year I will focus on that, starting with vectors and matrices. :)

[hildebrandopsj]

Hi Ned, Sorry for the time, unfortunately i cannot do the test in smath.
I waiting for the IT team to install the version 5.9.3 in my office pc

[Proektsoftbg]

No problem @hildebrandopsj ! It is not urgent at all. You can do it whenever you want.
It will be good that someone repeats the test on another computer. There is still possibility that SMath is not compatible with some software or hardware that affects the test results.