Do you ever modify an individual? If not, why not just write
world[p].ind = newpop
Also, did you profile to make sure that deepcopy is the bottleneck? If your
structures are that simple, it's surprising to me that deepcopy is taking a
long time.
Cédric
On Monday, September 7, 2015 at 1:08:50 PM UTC-4, alexande...@gmail.com
wrote:
>
> Hello everybody,
>
> I'm comparably new to Julia, but not completely new to programming. Yet,
> I'm a biologist by training, so please excuse potentially dumb questions in
> advance :)
>
> I am working in evolutionary ecology, programming individual-based
> simulations. I have now transferred a (very) simple program that simulates
> insect populations into Julia and am so far happy with its performance and
> style (I really fell in love with Julia). Yet, I do have a performance
> problem when it comes to copying a complex object. First of all my basic
> type structure:
>
> type TInd # an individual
> ld::Float64
> disp::Bool
> end
>
> type TPop # a single population
> ind::Array{TInd,1}
> end
>
> world = TPop[] # just to mention, this is NOT a global variable, but in
> my main simulation function to create multiple populations
>
> You see that I have a set (world) of populations (TPop), each being
> defined as arrays of individuals. During reproduction, I create a second
> Array of individuals, that stores the (mutating) offspring. So far so good.
> Yet, since I assume discrete generations, after each individual in a
> population has reproduced, the parental population is to be replaced by the
> offspring. I have implemented that like this:
>
> newpop = TInd[]
>
> # ... then the new population gets filled with offspring ...
>
> world[p].ind = deepcopy(newpop)
>
> Of course, this solution is working, but it is really slow. And since I do
> actually not need a copy of the newpop, but just want it to overwrite the
> original population, I guessed there might probably be a faster and more
> elegant solution (without complex workarounds, just somehow adjusting the
> pointers!?)? From what I've seen the model will probably run faster than in
> C++ as soon as I find the answer :)))
>
> I appreciate any help, thanks a lot in advance!
>
> All the best,
> Alex
>
