What is the fastest way to parse line with lots of Ints? - haskell

Question

I'm learning Haskell for two years now and I'm still confused, whats the best (fastest) way to read tons of numbers from a single input line.
For learning I registered into hackerearth.com trying to solve every challenge in Haskell. But now I'm stuck with a challenge because I run into timeout issues. My program is just too slow for beeing accepted by the site.
Using the profiler I found out it takes 80%+ of the time for parsing a line with lots of integers. The percentage gets even higher when the number of values in the line increases.
Now this is the way, I'm reading numbers from an input line:
import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as C8
main = do
scores <- fmap (map (fst . fromJust . C8.readInt) . C8.words) C8.getLine :: IO [Int]
Is there any way to get the data faster into the variable?
BTW: The biggest testcase consist of a line with 200.000 9-digits values. Parsing takes incredible long (> 60s).

Answer 1

It's always difficult to declare a particular approach "the fastest", since there's almost always some way to squeeze out more performance. However, an approach using Data.ByteString.Char8 and the general method you suggest should be among the fastest methods for reading numbers. If you encounter a case where performance is poor, the problem likely lies elsewhere.
To give some concrete results, I generated a 191Meg file of 20 million 9-digit numbers, space-separate on a single line. I then tried several general methods of reading a line of numbers and printing their sum (which, for the record, was 10999281565534666). The obvious approach using String:
reader :: IO [Int]
reader = map read . words <$> getLine
sum' xs = sum xs -- work around GHC ticket 10992
main = print =<< sum' <$> reader
took 52secs; a similar approach using Text:
import qualified Data.Text as T
import qualified Data.Text.IO as T
import qualified Data.Text.Read as T
readText = map parse . T.words <$> T.getLine
where parse s = let Right (n, _) = T.decimal s in n
ran in 2.4secs (but note that it would need to be modified to handle negative numbers!); and the same approach using Char8:
import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as C
readChar8 :: IO [Int]
readChar8 = map parse . C.words <$> C.getLine
where parse s = let Just (n, _) = C.readInt s in n
ran in 1.4secs. All examples were compiled with -O2 on GHC 8.0.2.
As a comparison benchmark, a scanf-based C implementation:
/* GCC 5.4.0 w/ -O3 */
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
long x, acc = 0;
while (scanf(" %ld", &x) == 1) {
acc += x;
}
printf("%ld\n", acc);
return 0;
}
ran in about 2.5secs, on par with the Text implementation.
You can squeeze a bit more performance out of the Char8 implementation. Using a hand-rolled parser:
readChar8' :: IO [Int]
readChar8' = parse <$> C.getLine
where parse = unfoldr go
go s = do (n, s1) <- C.readInt s
let s2 = C.dropWhile C.isSpace s1
return (n, s2)
runs in about 0.9secs -- I haven't tried to determine why there's a difference, but the compiler must be missing an opportunity to perform some optimization of the words-to-readInt pipeline.
Haskell Code for Reference
Make some numbers with Numbers.hs:
-- |Generate 20M 9-digit numbers:
-- ./Numbers 20000000 100000000 999999999 > data1.txt
import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as C
import Control.Monad
import System.Environment
import System.Random
main :: IO ()
main = do [n, a, b] <- map read <$> getArgs
nums <- replicateM n (randomRIO (a,b))
let _ = nums :: [Int]
C.putStrLn (C.unwords (map (C.pack . show) nums))
Find their sum with Sum.hs:
import Data.List
import qualified Data.Text as T
import qualified Data.Text.IO as T
import qualified Data.Text.Read as T
import qualified Data.Char8 as C
import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as C
import System.Environment
-- work around https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10992
sum' xs = sum xs
readString :: IO [Int]
readString = map read . words <$> getLine
readText :: IO [Int]
readText = map parse . T.words <$> T.getLine
where parse s = let Right (n, _) = T.decimal s in n
readChar8 :: IO [Int]
readChar8 = map parse . C.words <$> C.getLine
where parse s = let Just (n, _) = C.readInt s in n
readHand :: IO [Int]
readHand = parse <$> C.getLine
where parse = unfoldr go
go s = do (n, s1) <- C.readInt s
let s2 = C.dropWhile C.isSpace s1
return (n, s2)
main = do [method] <- getArgs
let reader = case method of
"string" -> readString
"text" -> readText
"char8" -> readChar8
"hand" -> readHand
print =<< sum' <$> reader
where:
./Sum string <data1.txt # 54.3 secs
./Sum text <data1.txt # 2.29 secs
./Sum char8 <data1.txt # 1.34 secs
./Sum hand <data1.txt # 0.91 secs