Executing loops efficiently with conditional statements

In this recipe, we want to calculate a sum of the positive entries of a large vector in an efficient way.

Getting ready

Open the Julia console. Make sure that you have the BenchmarkTools.jl package installed. If it is missing you can add it by running the following commands: using Pkg; Pkg.add("BenchmarkTools").

Before we begin, load the required packages and generate the vector over which we will perform a sum:

julia> using Random, BenchmarkTools

julia> Random.seed!(1);

julia> x = randn(10^6);

Notice that we use ; at the end of the expressions to suppress the output of the results.

Note

In the GitHub repository for this recipe, you will find the commands.txt file that contains the presented sequence of shell and Julia commands.

Now open your favorite terminal to execute the commands.

How to do it...

In the following steps, we investigate different methods for how the sum of positive values in a vector can be calculated, and then compare...