Conditional Threading is an optimization that searches for separate
blocks of IF
statements but with exactly the same
conditions. When several conditionals present the same boolean
condition, merging their inside actions would avoid computing the
condition several times. Also, in the cases where a second
IF
statement has been used with the exact negation of the
condition of the first IF
, the second IF
could
then be incorporated in an ELSE
statement.
Consider the following example:
code <- paste(
"n_evens <- 0",
"n_odds <- 0",
"odds_sum <- 0",
"evens_sum <- 0",
"",
"for (i in sample(10000, replace = TRUE)) {",
" if (i %% 2 == 1) {",
" n_odds <- n_odds + 1",
" }",
" if (i %% 2 == 1) {",
" odds_sum <- odds_sum + i",
" }",
" if (!(i %% 2 == 1)) {",
" n_evens <- n_evens + 1",
" }",
" if (!(i %% 2 == 1)) {",
" evens_sum <- evens_sum + i",
" }",
"}",
sep = "\n"
)
cat(code)
## n_evens <- 0
## n_odds <- 0
## odds_sum <- 0
## evens_sum <- 0
##
## for (i in sample(10000, replace = TRUE)) {
## if (i %% 2 == 1) {
## n_odds <- n_odds + 1
## }
## if (i %% 2 == 1) {
## odds_sum <- odds_sum + i
## }
## if (!(i %% 2 == 1)) {
## n_evens <- n_evens + 1
## }
## if (!(i %% 2 == 1)) {
## evens_sum <- evens_sum + i
## }
## }
Then, the automatically optimized code would be:
## n_evens <- 0
## n_odds <- 0
## odds_sum <- 0
## evens_sum <- 0
## for (i in sample(10000, replace = TRUE)) {
## if(i %% 2 == 1) {
## n_odds <- n_odds + 1
## odds_sum <- odds_sum + i
## }else {
## n_evens <- n_evens + 1
## evens_sum <- evens_sum + i
## }}
And if we measure the execution time of each one, and the speed-up:
bmark_res <- microbenchmark({
eval(parse(text = code))
}, {
eval(parse(text = opt_code))
})
autoplot(bmark_res)
## Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
## Expr_2 403.5224 386.094 302.3329 346.0635 304.2655 1106.613
The opt-cond-thread
optimizer simply looks for
IF
statements in the code snippet given as the input and if
it finds an IF
statement, it checks the immediate next
block of code. If it is another IF
statement, the optimizer
merges the two IF
blocks if the IF
conditions
were same or converts the second IF
statement to
ELSE
if the conditions were negation of each other.