Why is valarray so slow?

Question

I am trying to use valarray since it is much like MATLAB while operating vector and matrices. I first did some performance check and found that valarray cannot achieve the p

Answer 1

I'm compiling in release x64, Visual Studio 2010. I changed your code very slightly:

    double* a1 = &a[0], *b1 = &b[0], *c1 = &c[0];
    double dtime = gettime_hp();
    for (i=0 ; i

Here you can see that I used *= instead of c = a * b. In more modern mathematical libraries, very complex expression template mechanisms are used that eliminate this problem. In this case, I actually got very slightly faster results from valarray, although that's probably just because the contents were already in a cache. The overhead that you are seeing is simply redundant temporaries and nothing intrinsic to valarray, specifically- you'd see the same behaviour with something like std::string.