Performance

Elzed's fast. Really, really fast.

But what do we mean when we say that? In the past, "fast" has been hard to quantify in a way that was both meaningful and useful for comparison. Recently, however, we ran across Gary Beene's review of math parsers and were able to make some comparisons.

In his review, Mr. Beene compares more than a dozen different parsers, rating them for speed. The comparisons are based on how fast each parser repeatedly evaluates five different expressions; the results are expressed in "million iterations per second", or Mips. The most complex expression he tested was "abs(sin(sqr(x^2+y^2))*255)", and the summary of results tells the story: there's a wide range of performance, with the fastest parsers coming in at over 2.5 Mips.

How does Elzed compare? As it happens, pretty well--Elzed achieved results consistently above 3.5 Mips on our test system. I emphasize that these are my results, not Mr. Beene's, but should also mention that we tested Elzed on a Compaq EVO P4, not the Gateway Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 PC that he used. So, allowing for differences in the testbed, it's fair to say that Elzed is pretty durn fast. You should read Mr. Beene's entire review--he's the first to have done such a thorough analysis on this scale.