Slow performance using anonymous functions in MATLAB… have others noticed this?

Question

In order to refactor my MATLAB code, I thought I\'d pass around functions as arguments (what MATLAB calls anonymous functions), inspired by functional programming.

H

Answer 1

I faced the same issue as Gary, just thought it would be good to check Andrew's answer on a more recent version of Matlab (2014a) (Mac). The results first:

direct: 0.0722
anonymous: 0.3916
subfunction: 0.2277

And the code I used:

function []=SpeedTest()

fanon = @(x,y) x*x+y*y;

iter=1000000;
x=1:iter;
y=1:iter;
var1=nan(size(x));
var2=nan(size(x));
var3=nan(size(x));
timefor=struct('direct',nan,'anonymous',nan','subfunction',nan);

tic;
for i=1:iter
    var1(i)=x(i)*x(i)+y(i)*y(i);
end
timefor.direct=toc;

tic;
for i=1:iter
    var2(i)=fanon(x(i),y(i));
end
timefor.anonymous=toc;

tic;
for i=1:iter
    var3(i)=fsub(x(i),y(i));
end
timefor.subfunction=toc;

display(timefor);
end

function [z]=fsub(x,y)
z=x*x+y*y;
end