An Intro to Generic Numeric Programming with Spire

In this post I’d like to introduce you to what I have been calling generic numeric programming.

What is Generic Numeric Programming?

What do we mean by generic numeric programming? Let’s take a simple example; we want to add 2 numbers together. However, we don’t want to restrict ourselves to a particular type, like Int or Double , instead we just want to work with some generic type A that can be added. For instance:

def add [ A ]( x : A , y : A ) : A = x + y

Of course, this won’t compile since A has no method + . What we are really saying is that we want A to be some type that behaves like a number. The usual OO way to achieve this is by creating an interface that defines our desired behaviour. This is less than ideal, but if we were to go this route, our add function might look like this:

trait Addable [ A ] { self : A => def + ( that : A ) : A } def add [ A <: Addable [ A ]]( x : A , y : A ) : A = x + y

We’ve created an interface that defines our + method, and then bound our type parameter A to subsume this interface. The main problem with this is that we can’t directly use types out of our control, like those that come in the standard library (ie. Int , Long , Double , BigInt , etc). The only option would be to wrap these types, which means extra allocations and either explicit or implicit conversions, neither of which are good options.

A better approach is to use type classes. A discussion on type classes is out of the scope of this post, but they let us express that the type A must have some desired behaviour, without inheritence. Using the type class pattern, we could write something like this:

trait Addable [ A ] { // Both arguments must be provided. Addable works with the type A, but // does not extend it. def plus ( x : A , y : A ) : A } // This class adds the + operator to any type A that is Addable, // by delegating to that Addable's `plus` method. implicit class AddableOps [ A ]( lhs : A )( implicit ev : Addable [ A ]) { def + ( rhs : A ) : A = ev . plus ( lhs , rhs ) } // We use a context bound to require that A has an Addable instance. def add [ A: Addable ]( x : A , y : A ) : A = x + y

We can then easily add implementations for any numeric type, regardless if we control it or not, or even if it is a primitive type:

implicit object IntIsAddable extends Addable [ Int ] { def plus ( x : Int , y : Int ) : Int = x + y } add ( 5 , 4 )

This is, more or less, the approach Spire takes.

Why be Generic?

Why be generic? The flippant answer I could give is: why not? I do hope that after reading this, that is an acceptable answer to you, but I know that’s not what you came here for.

The first reason is the obvious one; sometimes you want to run the same algorithm, but with different number types. Euclid’s GCD algorithm is the same whether you are using Byte , Short , Int , Long , or BigInt . Why implement it only for 1, when you could do it for all 5? Worse; why implement it 5 times, when you need only implement it once?

Another reason is that you want to push certain trade-offs, such as speed vs precision to the user of your library, rather than making the decision for them. Double is fast, but has a fixed precision. BigDecimal is slow, but can have much higher precision. Which one do you use? When in doubt, let someone else figure it out!

A last great reason is that it let’s you write less tests and can make testing much less hairy.

One Algorithm, Many Types

So, what does a generic version of Euclid’s GCD algorithm look like? Spire strives to make generic numeric code look more or less like what you’d write for a direct implementation. So, let’s let you compare; first up, the direct implementation:

def euclidGcd ( x : Int , y : Int ) : Int = if ( y == 0 ) x else euclidGcd ( y , x % y )

With Spire, we can use the spire.math.Integral type class to rewrite this as:

import spire.math.Integral import spire.implicits._ def euclidGcd [ A: Integral ]( x : A , y : A ) : A = if ( y == 0 ) x else euclidGcd ( y , x % y )

The 2 methods are almost identical, save the Integral context bound. Integral gives us many methods we expect integers to have, like addition, multiplication, and euclidean division (quotient + remainder).

Because Spire provides default implicit instances of Integral for all of the integral types that come in the Scala standard library, we can immediately use euclidGcd to find the GCD of many integer types:

euclidGcd ( 42 , 96 ) euclidGcd ( 42L , 96L ) euclidGcd ( BigInt ( 42 ), BigInt ( 96 ))

This is much better than writing 5 different versions of the same algorithm! With Spire, you can actually do away with euclidGcd altogether, as gcd comes with Integral anyways:

spire . math . gcd ( BigInt ( 1 ), BigInt ( 2 ))

Performance vs Precision

Another benefit of generic numeric programming, is that you can push the choice of numeric type off to someone else. Rather than hardcode a method or data structure using Double , you can simple require some Fractional type.

I actually first found a need for generic numeric programming after I had implemented a swath of algorithms with double precision floating point arithmetic, only to find out that the minor precision errors were causing serious correctness issues. The obvious fix was to just to use an exact type, like spire.math.Rational , which would’ve worked for many of my purposes. However, many of the algorithms actually worked fine with doubles or even integers, where as others required exact n-roots (provided by a number type like spire.math.Real ). Being more precise meant everything got slower, even when it didn’t need to be. Being less precise meant some algorithms would occasionally return wrong answers. Abstracting out the actual number type used meant I didn’t have to worry about these issues. I could make the choice later, when I knew a bit more about my data, performance and precision requirements.

We can illustrate this using a simple algorithm to compute the mean of some numbers.

import spire.math._ import spire.implicits._ // Note: It is generally better to use an incremental mean. def mean [ A: Fractional ]( xs : A* ) : A = xs . reduceLeft ( _ + _ ) / xs . size

Here, we don’t care what type A is, as long as it can be summed and divided. If we’re working with approximate measurements, perhaps finding the mean of a list of Double s is good enough:

mean ( 0.5 , 1.5 , 0.0 ) // = 0.6666666666666666

Or perhaps we’d like an exact answer back instead:

import spire.math.Rational mean ( Rational ( 1 , 2 ), Rational ( 3 , 2 ), Rational ( 0 )) // = Rational(2, 3)

The main thing here is that as a user of the mean function, I get to choose whether I’d prefer the speed of Double or the precision or Rational . The algorithm itself looks no different, so why not give the user the choice?

Better Testing

One of the best things is that if you write test code that abstracts over the number type, then you can re-use your tests for many different types. Spire makes great use of this, to ensure instances of our type classes obey the rules of algebra and that the number types in Spire (Rational, Complex, UInt, etc) are fundamentally correct.

There is another benefit though – you can ignore the subtleties of floating point arithmetic in your tests if you want! If your code works with any number type, then you can test with an exact type such as spire.math.Rational or spire.math.Real . No more epsilons and NaNs. You shouldn’t let this excuse you from writing numerically stable code, but it may save you many false negatives in your build system, while also making you more confident that the fundamentals are correct.

This is a big topic, deserving of its own blog post (you know who you are), so I’ll leave this here.

What Abstractions Exist?

We’ve already seen Integral , which can be used wherever you need something that acts like an integer. We also saw the modulus operator, x % y , but not integer division. Spire differentiates between integer division and exact division. You perform integer division with x /~ y . To see it in action, let’s use an overly complicated function to negate an integer:

import spire.math._ import spire.implicits._ def negate [ A: Integral ]( x : A ) = -( 42 * ( x /~ 42 ) + x % 42 )

Instances of Integral exist for Byte , Short , Int , Long and BigInt .

Another type class Spire provides is Fractional[A] , which is used for things that have “exact” division. “Exact” is in quotes, since Double or BigDecimal division isn’t really exact, but it’s close enough that we give them a pass. Fractional also provides x.sqrt and x nroot k for taking the roots of a number.

def distance [ A: Fractional ]( x : A , y : A ) : A = ( x ** 2 + y ** 2 ). sqrt

Note that Fractional[A] <: Integral[A] , so anything you can do with Integral , you can do with Fractional[A] too. Here, we can use distance to calculate the length of the hypotenuse with Double s, Float s, BigDecimal s, or some of Spire’s number types like Real or Rational .

Lastly, you often have cases where you just don’t care if / means exact or integer division, or whether you are taking the square root of an Int or a Double . For this kind of catch-all work Spire provides Numeric[A] .

Why Spire?

If you’ve already hit the types of problems solved by generic numeric programming, then you may have seen that scala.math also provides Numeric , Integral , and Fractional , so why use Spire? Well, we originally created Spire largely due to the problems with the type classes as they exist in Scala.

To start, Scala’s versions aren’t specialized, so they only worked with boxed versions of primitive types. The operators in Scala also required boxing, which means you need to trade-off performance for readability. They also aren’t very useful for a lot of numeric programming; what about nroots, trig functions, unsigned types, etc?

Spire also provides many more useful (and specialized) type classes. Some are ones you’d expect, like Eq and Order , while others define more basic algebras than Numeric and friends, like Ring , Semigroup , VectorSpace , etc.

There are many useful number types that are missing from Scala in Spire, such as Rational , Complex , UInt , etc.

Spire was written by people who actually use it. I somewhat feel like Scala’s Numeric and friends weren’t really used much after they were created, other than for Scala’s NumericRange support (ie. 1.2 to 2.4 by 0.1 ). They miss many little creature comforts whose need becomes apparent after using Scala’s type classes for a bit.

Spire is Fast

One of Spire’s goals is that the performance of generic code shouldn’t suffer. Ideally, the generic code should be as fast as the direct implementation. Using the GCD implementation above as an example, we can compare Spire vs. Scala vs. a direct implementation. I’ve put the benchmarking code up as a Gist.

gcdDirect: 29.981 1.00 x gcdDirect gcdSpire: 30.094 1.00 x gcdDirect gcdSpireNonSpec: 36.903 1.23 x gcdDirect gcdScala: 38.989 1.30 x gcdDirect

For another example, we can look at the code to find the mean of an array.

meanDirect: 10.592 **1.00 x gcdDirect** meanSpire: 10.638 **1.00 x gcdDirect** meanSpireNonSpec: 13.434 **1.26 x gcdDirect** meanScala: 19.388 **1.83 x gcdDirect**

Spire achieves these goals fairly simply. All our type classes are @specialized , so when using primitives types you can avoid boxing. We then use macros to remove the boxing normally required for the operators by the implicit conversions.

Using @specialized , both gcdSpire and meanSpire aren’t noticably slower than the direct implementation. We can see the slow down caused by dropping @specialized in gcdSpireNonSpec and meanSpireNonSpec . The difference between gcdSpireNonSpec and gcdScala is because Spire doesn’t allocate an object for the % operator (using macros to remove the allocation). The difference is even more pronounced between meanSpireNonSpec and meanScala .

More than just Numeric , Integral , and Fractional

The 3 type classes highlighted in this post are just the tip of the iceberg. Spire provides a whole slew of type classes in spire.algebra . This package contains type classes representing a wide variety of algebraic structures, such as Monoid , Group , Ring , Field , VectorSpace , and more. The 3 type classes discussed above provide a good starting point, but if you use Spire in your project, you will probably find yourself using spire.algebra more and more often. If you’d like to learn more, you can watch my talk on abstract algebra in Scala.

As an example of using the algebra package, spire.math.Integral is simply defined as:

import spire.algebra. { EuclideanRing , IsReal } trait Integral [ A ] extends EuclideanRing [ A ] with IsReal [ A ] // Includes Order[A] with Signed[A]. with ConvertableFrom [ A ] with ConvertableTo [ A ]

Whereas spire.math.Fractional is just:

import spire.algebra. { Field , NRoot } trait Fractional [ A ] extends Integral [ A ] with Field [ A ] with NRoot [ A ]

Many New Number Types

Spire also adds many new useful number types. Here’s an incomplete list:

spire.math.Rational is a fast, exact number type for working with rational numbers,

is a fast, exact number type for working with rational numbers, spire.math.Complex[A] is a parametric number type for complex numbers,

is a parametric number type for complex numbers, spire.math.Number is a boxed number type that strives for flexibility of use,

is a boxed number type that strives for flexibility of use, spire.math.Interval is a number type for interval arithmetic,

is a number type for interval arithmetic, spire.math.Real is a number type for exact geometric computation that provides exact n-roots, as well as exact division,

is a number type for exact geometric computation that provides exact n-roots, as well as exact division, spire.math.{UByte,UShort,UInt,ULong} unsigned integer types, and

unsigned integer types, and spire.math.Natural an arbitrary precision unsigned integer type.

Better Readability

Spire also provides better operator integration with Int and Double . For instance, 2 * x or x * 2 will just work for any x whose type has an Ring . On the other hand, Scala requires something like implicitly[Numeric[A]].fromInt(2) * x which is much less readable. This also goes for working with fractions; x * 0.5 will just work, if x has a Field .

Try It Out!

Spire has a basic algebra that let’s us work generically with numeric types. It does this without sacrificing readability or performance. It also provides many more useful abstractions and concrete number types. This means you can write less code, write less tests, and worry less about concerns like performance vs. precision. If this appeals to you, then you should try it out!

There is some basic information on getting up-and-running with Spire in SBT on Spire’s project page. If you have any further questions, comments, suggestions, criticism or witticisms you can say what you want to say on the Spire mailing list or on IRC on Freenode in #spire-math .

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