How to create a function which measures time performance of algorithms? - swift

Question

If I want to evaluate time performance of a few algos using Date() or Dispatch() how can I create a function that does this?
For example this binary search algo. How can I pass it as a closure parameter and have the closure do all of the time performance measuring using any of the Swift time keeping methods below? Please answer with an example of a closure. Thanks.
let startingPoint = Date()
let startingPoint = Dispatch().now
func binarySearchForValue(searchValue: Int, array: [Int]) -> Bool {
var leftIndex = 0
var rightIndex = array.count - 1
while leftIndex <= rightIndex {
let middleIndex = (leftIndex + rightIndex) / 2
let middleValue = array[middleIndex]
if middleValue == searchValue {
return true
}
if searchValue < middleValue {
rightIndex = middleIndex - 1
}
if searchValue > middleValue {
leftIndex = middleIndex + 1
}
}
return false
}

Answer 1

Since you may want to measure different functions, it probably makes sense to capture the arguments for the function in the closure instead of including their types in the signature. But I did use a generic type for the return value. I hope that this is what you're after:
func measure<R>(_ label: String, operation: () -> R) -> R {
let start = DispatchTime.now()
let result = operation()
let end = DispatchTime.now()
let nanoTime = end.uptimeNanoseconds - start.uptimeNanoseconds
let timeInterval = Double(nanoTime) / 1_000_000_000
print(String(format: "%#: %.9f s", label, timeInterval))
return result
}
Here's how you use it:
let result = measure("search") { binarySearchForValue(searchValue: 3, array: [1, 3, 8]) }
print(result) // that's the result of the function that was measured, not the measurement
measure("some function") { functionWithoutReturnValue() }
If the function has no return value, R will be (), so that should work too. Just don't assign the result to anything (see the example above). If you want to do something with the measurement other than printing it to the console, you can do that, too. But you didn't specify that in your question, so I went with print.

Answer 2

Not sure what exactly you are after here and this solution below will only fit one specific function signature to test
func testBench(search: Int, array: [Int], testCase test: (Int, [Int]) -> Bool) {
let start = DispatchTime.now()
test(search, array)
let end = DispatchTime.now()
print("\(start) - \(end)")
}
called like this
testBench(search: 3, array: [6,7,5,3]) {binarySearchForValue(searchValue: $0, array: $1)}

Answer 3

You should use XCTest to measure the performance ... It gives you proper stats for your method in terms of performance
i.e.
func testMyCodesPerformance() {
measureBlock {
someClass.doSomethingFancy()
}
}
You can do lot more using XCTest measureBlock for performance testing