Splitting an array into stride by 2

Question

i've written a basic function to split an array into stride by 2:

[z] -> [x],[y]

    func splitArray(Z x:[Float64])->(Real:[Float64],Imag:[Float64])
    {
      guard (x.count % 2 == 0) else {"BOMB:: need even number of elements in array \(#file) \(#line) \(#function)"
      return ([0.0],[0.0])
      }
      var Real:[Float64] = zeroD(npts: Int(x.count/2) )
      var Imag:[Float64] = zeroD(npts: Int(x.count/2) )
      var ida:Int = 0, idb:Int = 0
  for elem in stride(from:0, to: x.count-1, by:2)
  {
      Real[ida] = x[elem]
      ida += 1
  }
  for elem in stride(from:1, to:x.count, by:2)
  {
    Imag[idb] = x[elem]
    idb += 1
  }
      return (Real,Imag)
}

Does anyone have a faster map? Sometimes map is not that fast and just hides the loop?

I'm hoping for solutions which have been designed to crunch big data arrays or like google's big table, although not sparse. Something like a Metal/GPU pipeline? hyper-threading model? an Atomic que/stack? pulling in an external optimized lib like boost?

The algorithm behind map is unknown, sometimes it's faster than a simple loop sometimes not. It's not deterministic, generally not a good thing, but it's easy to implement.

I've tried unrolling loops in Xcode flags but seems to make no different with an arrays of size MxN>[500,500].

Answer 1

As others have commented, it's not clear what your performance issue is currently and what your performance target is, but the function could certainly be rewritten to be more concise and use only a single "loop", like this:

func split<T>(array:[T])->(real:[T], imag:[T]) {
    // I didn't include your guard because it wasn't necessary for safety in this implementation, but you could include it here if you wished.
    return array.enumerated().reduce(([T](), [T]())) {
        (result:(real:[T], imag:[T]), input:(index:Int, element:T)) in
        input.index % 2 == 0 ? (result.real + [input.element], result.imag) : (result.real, result.imag + [input.element])
    }
}

This implementation uses reduce to loop through the source array once, and accumulate a tuple of two arrays as a result. The reduce is use on the enumerated() source array, so that the closure received both the element, and the index of that element in the original array. This way, by checking the mod 2 of the index, we can see if the element was in an even or an odd position and add it to the correct resulting array accordingly.

Lastly, since we don't really need to know what the specific type of the array's element is for this behavior, this implementation is generic and will split any array of anything into two new arrays: one with all the even-indexed elements, and one with all the odd-indexed elements.