Efficiency of C# on Linux

This week I attended Mads Torgersen’s talk Why you should take another look at C#. Afterward I asked him about the efficiency of C# on Linux. When I last looked into it, it wasn’t good. A few years ago I asked someone on my team to try running some C# software on Linux using Mono. The code worked correctly, but it ran several times slower than on Windows.

Mads said that now with .NET Core, C# code runs about as fast on Linux as Windows. Maybe a few percent slower on Linux. Scott Hanselman joined the conversation and explained that with .NET Core, the same code runs on every platform. The Mono project duplicated the much of the functionality of the .NET framework, but it was an entirely independent implementation and not as efficient.

I had assumed the difference was due to compiler optimizations or lack thereof, but Scott and Mads said that the difference was mostly the code implementation. There are some compiler optimizations that are better on the Windows side, and so C# might run a little faster on Windows, but the performance is essentially the same on both platforms.

I could recommend C# to a client running Linux if there’s a 5% performance penalty, but a 500% performance penalty was a show-stopper. Now I’d consider using C# on a project where I need more performance than Python or R, but wanted to use something easier to work with than C++.

Years ago I developed software with the Microsoft stack, but I moved away from Microsoft tools when I quit doing the kind of software development the tools are geared for. So I don’t write C# much any more. It’s been about a year since I had a project where I needed to write C# code. But I like the C# language. You can tell that a lot of thought has gone into the design, and the tool support is great. Now that the performance is better on Linux I’d consider using it for numerical simulations.

Leading digits and quadmath

My previous post looked at a problem that requires repeatedly finding the first digit of kn where k is a single digit but n may be on the order of millions or billions.

The most direct approach would be to first compute kn as a very large integer, then find it’s first digit. That approach is slow, and gets slower as n increases. A faster way is to look at the fractional part of log kn = n log k and see which digit it corresponds to.

If n is not terribly big, this can be done in ordinary precision. But when n is large, multiplying log k by n and taking the fractional part brings less significant digits into significance. So for very large n, you need extra precision. I first did this in Python using SymPy, then switched to C++ for more speed. There I used the quadmath library for gcc. (If n is big enough, even quadruple precision isn’t enough. An advantage to SymPy over quadmath is that the former has arbitrary precision. You could, for example, set the precision to be 10 more than the number of decimal places in n in order to retain 10 significant figures in the fractional part of n log k.)

The quadmath.h header file needs to be wrapped in an extern C declaration. Otherwise gcc will give you misleading error messages.

The 128-bit floating point type __float128 has twice as many bits as a double. The quadmath functions have the same name as their standard math.h counterparts, but with a q added on the end, such as log10q and fmodq below.

Here’s code for computing the leading digit of kn that illustrates using quadmath.

#include <cmath >
extern "C" {
#include <quadmath.h>

__float128 logs[11];

for (int i = 2; i  <= 10; i++)
    logs[i] = log10q(i + 0.0);

int first_digit(int base, long long exponent)
    __float128 t = fmodq(exponent*logs[base], 1.0);
        if (t  < logs[i])
            return i-1;

The code always returns because t is less than 1.

Caching the values of log10q saves repeated calls to a relatively expensive function. So does using the search at the bottom rather than computing powq(10, t).

The linear search at the end is more efficient than it may seem. First, it’s only search a list of length 9. Second, because of Benford’s law, the leading digits are searched in order of decreasing frequency, i.e. most inputs will cause first_digit to return early in the search.

When you compile code using quadmath, be sure to add -lquadmath to the compile command.

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C++ at Facebook

Andrei Alexandrescu said in a panel discussion last week that when he joined Facebook two years ago, maybe 90% of the programmers wrote PHP and 10% C++. Now there are roughly as many C++ programmers as PHP programmers.

One reason Facebook is shifting more work to C++ is to reduce operating costs such as power consumption per user.

Andrei’s remarks are about 24 minutes into this video.

C++ Renaissance

Dynamic language developers who are concerned about performance end up writing pieces of their applications in C++. So if you’re going to write C++ anyway, why not write your entire application in C++?

Library writers develop in C++ so that their users won’t have to. That makes a lot of sense. But if you’re developing your own application, not a library, maybe it would be better to write everything in C++ instead of wrapping C++ in something else.

A few years ago an immediate objection would be that C++ is hard to use. But with the advent of C++ 11, that’s not as true as it once was. C++ has gained many of the conveniences traditionally associated with other languages. (Update: for more on this theme, see Not Your Father’s C++.)

Dynamic languages are designed for programmer productivity[1] at the expense of efficiency. If you can afford that trade-off, and quite often you can, then don’t worry about C++. But if you’re using a dynamic language and C++, maybe it would be easier to just stick to C++. Of course the decision depends on many factors — how much of the application needs to be efficient, the size and skill of your team, etc. — but I suspect more projects will decide to do everything in C++ because of its new features.

* * *

[1] “Productivity” implicitly assumes productivity at a certain set of tasks. If your tasks fall into the set of things a language was designed to support, great. But a “productivity” language may not improve your productivity if you don’t meet the language’s intended profile.

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a < b < c

In Python, and in some other languages, the expression a < b < c is equivalent to a < b and b < c. For example, the following code outputs “not increasing.”

a, b, c = 3, 1, 2
if a < b < c:
    print "increasing"
    print "not increasing"

Now consider the analogous C code.

int a = 3, b = 1, c = 2;
if (a < b < c)
    printf( "increasingn" );
    printf("not increasingn");

This outputs “increasing”!

If you don’t know C, you’d expect the output to be “not increasing.” If you do know C, you might expect the code not to compile.

Here’s what’s going on. The code first asks whether a < b. This evaluates to 0 because a < b is false. Then it asks whether 0 < c, which is true.

If the code above were part of a C++ program, it would still compile and still produce the same result. However, the compiler would generate a warning for implicitly casting Boolean result to an integer.

Using C# like a scripting language

Clift Norris wrote a clever little batch file csrun.bat several years ago. I thought I’d posted it here, but apparently not. If you have a C# program in foo.cs, you can type csrun foo.cs to compile and run the program.

The batch file doesn’t do much at all, but it might change how you think about a C# program. The C# code is still compiled, but since the compilation step is hidden, it feels more like an interpreted language.

When someone says they like interpreted languages, maybe what they really mean is that they enjoy running code quickly without the overhead of starting up an IDE, compiling the code, navigating to the directory containing the compiled executable, etc. This has nothing to do with whether a language is compiled or interpreted.

@echo off
REM : Compile and run a C# source file.
REM : The C# compiler (csc.exe) must be in your PATH.
REM : The command line argument is expected to be something like foo.cs

if "%1"=="" goto USAGE

csc.exe /nologo /out:%1.exe  %1

%1.exe	%2  %3  %4  %5
goto EXIT

echo You must specify an argument representing the C# file you want to run.


This batch file does not set references; you’d need to modify it if you want to reference an assembly.

Update: CsharpRepl is a REPL (read-evaluate-print-loop) that lets you write C# at the command line as you would most scripting languages. CsharpRepl is part of Mono and works cross-platform. Thanks to MikeG in the comments.

Related post: Visual Studio 2010 is a pig

What most C++ programmers do



Related post: The dark matter of programmers

A couple Python-like features in C++11

The new C++ standard includes a couple Python-like features that I ran across recently. There are other Python-like features in the new standard, but here I’ll discuss range-based for-loops and raw strings.
In Python you loop over lists rather than rather than incrementing a loop counter variable. For example,

for p in [2, 3, 5, 7, 11]:
    print p

Range-based for loops now let you do something similar in C++11:

int primes[5] = {2, 3, 5, 7, 11};
for (int &p : primes)
    cout << p << "n";

Also, Python has raw strings. If you preface a quoted string with R, the contents of the string is interpreted literally. For example,

print "Hello\nworld"

will produce



print R"Hello\nworld"

will produce


because the \n is no longer interpreted as a newline character but instead printed literally as two characters.

Raw strings in C++11 use R as well, but they also require a delimiter inside the quotation marks. For example,

cout << R"(Hello\nworld)";

The C++ raw string syntax is a little harder to read than the Python counterpart since it requires parentheses. The advantage, however, is that such strings can contain double quotes since a double quote alone does not terminate the string. For example,

cout << R"(Hello "world")";

would print

Hello "world"

In Python this is unnecessary since single and double quotes are interchangeable; if you wanted double quotes inside your string, you’d use single quotes on the outside.

Note that raw strings in C++ require a capital R unlike Python that allows r or R.

The C++ features mentioned here are supported gcc 4.6.0. The MinGW version of gcc for Windows is available here. To use C++11 features in gcc, you must add the parameter -std=c++0x to the g++ command line. For example,

g++ -std=c++0x hello.cpp

Visual Studio 2010 supports many of the new C++ features, but not the ones discussed here.

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Maybe C++ hasn’t jumped the shark after all

A couple years ago I wrote a blog post Has C++ jumped the shark? I wondered how many people would care about the new C++ standard by the time it came out. I doubted that it would matter much to me personally.


The new standard is out now, and I find it more interesting that I thought I would have. I’d still rather not use C++ for tasks that are easier in another language I know, but sometimes I don’t have that option.

When I heard about plans to add lambdas and closures to C++ I commented here that “it seems odd to add these features to C++.”  Now I think lambdas (anonymous functions) and closures may be the most important new features for my use.

One of my favorite features in Python is the ability to define functions on the fly. If I’m writing a function and need to create a new function to pass as an argument, then I can define that function on the spot. By contrast, C++ has not let you define a function inside a function. Now you can.

(You still cannot define a named function inside a C++ function. However, you can create anonymous functions inside another function. If you save that anonymous function to a variable, then you’ve effectively created a named function.)

Here are a couple examples of how it can be very convenient to define little functions on the fly. First, optimization software typically provides methods for minimizing functions. If you want to maximize a f(x), you define a new function g(x) = -f(x) and minimize g. Second, root-finding software typically solves equations of the form f(x) = 0. If you want to solve f(x) = c, you create a new function g(x) = f(x) – c and find where g is zero. In both cases, the function g is so trivial that there’s no need to give it a name. And more importantly, you’d rather define this auxiliary function right where you need it than interrupt your context by defining it outside.

Anonymous functions can also have associated data obtained from the context where they’re defined. That’s called a closure because it encloses some context with the function. This is very often necessary in mathematical software development. For example, say you have a function of two variables f(x, y) and you want to integrate f with respect to x, holding y constant. You might then think of f as a function of one variable with one constant, but the compiler sees it as a function of two variables and will not let you pass it to an integration routine expecting a function of one variable. One way to solve this problem is to use function objects. This isn’t difficult, but it requires a lot of ceremony compared to using closures.

For specifics of how to use lambdas and closures in C++, see Ajay Vijayvargiya’s article Explicating the new C++ standard (C++0x), and its implementation in VC10.

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Calling C++ from R

This post relates my experience with calling C++ from R by writing an R module from scratch and by the inline module.

The most reliable way to speed up R code is to take it out of R. I’ve looked at various tricks for speeding up R code and none have improved the performance of code more than a few percent. Rewriting R code in C++, however, can speed it up by a couple orders of magnitude.

Until recently, my preferred approach to speeding up an R program has been to rewrite it entirely in C++. Now I’m looking at ways to rewrite only key parts of the code because I’m working with collaborators who want to work in R as much as they can. I’ve tried two approaches. The first I’ll call the bare-knuckle approach, writing an R package starting from C++ sample code from a colleague. The second approach is using the R module inline to embed C++ code in R.

I’ve tested everything on six computers: two running Windows 7, and one each running Windows XP, Ubuntu 10.04, Ubuntu 11.04, and Mac OS X 10.6.

Working with R and C++ on Windows requires installing Rtools and adding it to your path. I have not been able to get Rtools to work on my Windows XP machine. It apparently installs successfully, but everything that requires it fails. On my Windows 7 machines I’ve been able to install R packages containing C++ source but I’ve not been able to build them.

(In R terminology, “building” a package means gathering the source into a format that R wants. This does not “build” in the sense of compiling the C++ source; the C++ compilation happens on install. So, in theory, one could build an R package on one operating system and then install it on another.)

I’ve been able to build R packages on Ubuntu and Mac OS X and install them on Windows 7, albeit with warnings. The install process complains bitterly, but apparently everything works. At least once I got an error message saying that R couldn’t find the compiler, but apparently it did since the code did in fact compile. (Rtools on Windows installs a Unix-like build system, including the gcc compiler.)

Building and installing R packages on Ubuntu has worked smoothly. I’ve been able to build R packages on OS X and install them on Ubuntu, but not always the other way around. Sometimes R packages built on Ubuntu will install on OS X and sometimes not. My Ubuntu 10.04 box runs a newer version of gcc but an older version of R compared to the Mac, so the portability problems may come from tool version differences rather than operating system differences.

The bare-knuckle approach to writing R packages involves a great deal of tedious work. The R package Rcpp eliminates much of this tedium. The R package inline makes the process even simpler. Using inline you can include C++ source code in your R file and have the code compile automatically when the R code runs. This is the simplest way to call C++ from R, when it works. You can read far more about Rcpp and inline on Dirk Eddelbuettel’s web site.

I find the inline approach promising. It could be a convenient way for me to give C++ code to collaborators who may not be able to write C++ but who could read it. It would also eliminate the portability problems that could arise from building a package on one platform and installing it on another.

The inline module worked smoothly on my Ubuntu 11.04 machine, but not at all on Ubuntu 10.04. I was unable to install Rcpp or inline on Ubuntu 10.04 from R itself, though I was able to install these packages through the Synaptic Package Manager. The packages load from R, but fail when I try to use them.

I was able to get inline to work from Windows 7 and from OS X, though in both cases there are numerous warnings.

It was not immediately clear to me how to use inline to call a C++ function that depended on another C++ function. If you want to call a single C++ function f() from R, you could put its source code in an R string and pass that string as an argument to cxxfunction. But what if the function f() uses a function g()?

My first thought was to define g() inside f(). C++ doesn’t let you define a function inside a function, but it does let you define a struct inside a function, so you could make g() a method on a struct to get around this language limitation.

It turns out there’s a more direct method. In addition to the body argument for source code, the function cxxfunction also has an argument includes for header files. You could put the source of g() in a header file and pass a string with a #include statement for that header as the value of includes. However, I don’t know where inline looks for headers. Apparently it does not look in the working directory of the R process that calls it. However, you could pass the content of the header file as the value of includes rather than a #include statement. After all, the first thing the C++ compiler will do with a header file reference is replace it with the contents of the file. So you could put the source for g() or any other dependencies in a string passed as the includes argument.

Calling C++ from R has been painful, but I expect will be easier in the future now that I’ve learned a few things the hard way.

Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?


My response has two parts:

  1. Why I believe C++ libraries are often complicated.
  2. Why I don’t think it has to be that way.


This weekend The Register quoted Herb Sutter saying “The world is built on C++.” The article goes on to mention some of the foundational software written in C++.









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C# math gotchas

C# has three mathematical constants that look like constants in the C header file float.h. Two of these are not what you might expect.

The constant double.MaxValue in C# looks like the constant DBL_MAX in C, and indeed it is. Both give the maximum finite value of a double, which is on the order of 10^308. This might lead you to believe that double.MinValue in C# is the same as DBL_MIN in C or that double.Epsilon in C# is the same as DBL_EPSILON. If so, you’re in for a surprise.

The constants DBL_MAX and double.MaxValue are the same because there is no ambiguity over what “max” means: the largest finite value of a double. But DBL_MIN and double.MinValue are different because they minimize over different ranges. The constant DBL_MIN is the smallest positive value of a normalized double. The constant double.MinValue in C# is the smallest (i.e. most negative) value of a double and is the negative of double.MaxValue. The difference between DBL_MIN and double.MinValue is approximately the difference between 10^-308 and -10^308, between a very small positive number and a very large negative number.

C has a constant DBL_EPSILON for the smallest positive double precision number x such that 1 + x does not equal 1 in machine precision. Typically a double has about 15 figures of precision, and so DBL_EPSILON is on the order of 10^-16. (For a more precise description, see Anatomy of a floating point number.)

You might expect double.Epsilon in C# corresponds to DBL_EPSILON in C. I did, until a unit test failed on some numerical code I was porting from C++ to C#. But in C# double.Epsilon is the smallest positive value a (denormalized) double can take. It is similar to DBL_MIN, except that double.Epsilon is the possible smallest value of a double, not requiring normalization. The constant DBL_MIN is on the order of 10^-308 while double.Epsilon is on the order of 10^-324 because it allows denormalized values. (See Anatomy of a floating point number for details of denormalized numbers.)

Incidentally, the C constants DBL_MAX, DBL_MIN, and DBL_EPSILON equal the return values of max, min, and epsilon for the C++ class numeric_limits<double>.

To summarize,

  • double.MaxValue in C# equals DBL_MAX in C.
  • double.MinValue in C# equals -DBL_MAX in C.
  • double.Epsilon is similar to DBL_MIN in C, but orders of magnitude smaller.
  • C# has no analog of DBL_EPSILON from C.

One could argue that the C# names are better than the C names. It makes sense for double.MinValue to be the negative of double.MaxValue. But the use of Epsilon was a mistake. The term “epsilon” in numeric computing has long been established and is not limited to C. It would have been better if Microsoft had used the name MinPositiveValue to be more explicit and not conflict with established terminology.

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Math library functions that seem unnecessary

This post will give several examples of functions include in the standard C math library that seem unnecessary at first glance.

Function log1p(x) = log(1 + x)

The function log1p computes log(1 + x).  How hard could this be to implement?

log(1 + x);


But wait. What if x is very small? If x is 10-16, for example, then on a typical system 1 + x = 1 because machine precision does not contain enough significant bits to distinguish 1 + x from 1. (For details, see Anatomy of a floating point number.) That means that the code log(1 + x) would first compute 1 + x, obtain 1, then compute log(1), and return 0. But log(1 + 10-16) ≈ 10-16. This means the absolute error is about 10-16 and the relative error is 100%. For values of x larger than 10-16 but still fairly small, the code log(1 + x) may not be completely inaccurate, but the relative error may still be unacceptably large.

Fortunately, this is an easy problem to fix. For small x, log(1 + x) is approximately x. So for very small arguments, just return x. For larger arguments, compute log(1 + x) directly. See details here.

Why does this matter? The absolute error is small, even if the code returns a zero for a non-zero answer. Isn’t that OK? Well, it might be. It depends on what you do next. If you add the result to a large number, then the relative error in the answer doesn’t matter. But if you multiply the result by a large number, your large relative error becomes a large absolute error as well.

Function expm1(x) = exp(x) – 1

Another function that may seem unnecessary is expm1. This function computes ex – 1. Why not just write this?

exp(x) - 1.0;

That’s fine for moderately large x. For very small values of x, exp(x) is close to 1, maybe so close to 1 that it actually equals 1 to machine precision. In that case, the code exp(x) - 1 will return 0 and result in 100% relative error. As before, for slightly larger values of x the naive code will not be entirely inaccurate, but it may be less accurate than needed. The solution is to compute exp(x) – 1 directly without first computing exp(x). The Taylor series for exp(x) is 1 + x + x2/2 … So for very small x, we could just return x for exp(x) – 1. Or for slightly larger x, we could return x + x2/2. (See details here.)

Functions erf(x) and erfc(x)

The C math library contains a pair of functions erf and erfc. The “c” stands for “complement” because erfc(x) = 1 – erf(x). The function erf(x) is known as the error function and is not trivial to implement. But why have a separate routine for erfc? Isn’t it trivial to implement once you have code for erf? For some values of x, yes, this is true. But if x is large, erf(x) is near 1, and the code 1 - erf(x) may return 0 when the result should be small but positive. As in the examples above, the naive implementation results in a complete loss of precision for some values and a partial loss of precision for other values.

Functions Γ(x) and log Γ(x)

The standard C math library has two functions related to the gamma function: tgamma that returns Γ(x) and lgamma that return log Γ(x). Why have both? Why can’t the latter just use the log of the former? The gamma function grows extremely quickly. For moderately large arguments, its value exceeds the capacity of a computer number. Sometimes you need these astronomically large numbers as intermediate results. Maybe you need a moderate-sized number that is the ratio of two very large numbers. (See an example here.) In such cases, you need to subtract lgamma values rather than take the ratio of tgamma values. (Why is the function called “tgamma” and not just “gamma”? See the last paragraph and first comment on this post.)


The standard C math library distills a lot of experience. Some of the functions may seem unnecessary, and so they are for some arguments. But for other arguments these functions are indispensable.

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The dark matter of programmers

Kate Gregory said in an interview that she likes to call C++ programmers the dark matter of the software development world. They’re not visible — they don’t attend conferences and they don’t buy a lot of books — and yet there are a lot of them.

I’ve thought the same about those who write code for games and embedded systems. I’ve hardly met anyone who works in either area, but there is a huge amount of such software and someone has to be writing it.

Game developers and embedded systems folk often work in C++, so my observation would overlap with Kate Gregory’s.

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