Ruby 2.4 has optimized enumerable min max methods

Chirag Shah

By Chirag Shah

on September 28, 2017

This blog is part of our  Ruby 2.4 series.

Enumerables in Ruby have min, max and minmax comparison methods which are quite convenient to use.

1
2(1..99).min #=> 1
3(1..99).max #=> 99
4(1..99).minmax #=> [1, 99]
5

In Ruby 2.4, Enumurable#min, Enumurable#max methods and Enumurable#minmax method are now more optimized.

We would run the following benchmark snippet for both Ruby 2.3 and Ruby 2.4 and observe the results

1
2require 'benchmark/ips'
3
4Benchmark.ips do |bench|
5NUM1 = 1_000_000.times.map { rand }
6
7ENUM_MIN = Enumerable.instance_method(:min).bind(NUM1)
8ENUM_MAX = Enumerable.instance_method(:max).bind(NUM1)
9ENUM_MINMAX = Enumerable.instance_method(:minmax).bind(NUM1)
10
11bench.report('Enumerable#min') do
12ENUM_MIN.call
13end
14
15bench.report('Enumerable#max') do
16ENUM_MAX.call
17end
18
19bench.report('Enumerable#minmax') do
20ENUM_MINMAX.call
21end
22end
23

Results for Ruby 2.3

1
2Warming up --------------------------------------
3Enumerable#min 1.000 i/100ms
4Enumerable#max 1.000 i/100ms
5Enumerable#minmax 1.000 i/100ms
6Calculating -------------------------------------
7Enumerable#min 14.810 (±13.5%) i/s - 73.000 in 5.072666s
8Enumerable#max 16.131 (± 6.2%) i/s - 81.000 in 5.052324s
9Enumerable#minmax 11.758 (± 0.0%) i/s - 59.000 in 5.026007s
10

Ruby 2.4

1
2Warming up --------------------------------------
3Enumerable#min 1.000 i/100ms
4Enumerable#max 1.000 i/100ms
5Enumerable#minmax 1.000 i/100ms
6Calculating -------------------------------------
7Enumerable#min 18.091 (± 5.5%) i/s - 91.000 in 5.042064s
8Enumerable#max 17.539 (± 5.7%) i/s - 88.000 in 5.030514s
9Enumerable#minmax 13.086 (± 7.6%) i/s - 66.000 in 5.052537s
10

From the above benchmark results, it can be seen that there has been an improvement in the run times for the methods.

Internally Ruby has changed the logic by which objects are compared, which results in these methods being optimized. You can have a look at the commits here and here.

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