Clojure on The Beagleboard

After three months of waiting finally my beagleboard arrived (thank you TI for being really really slow), usually my distribution of choice is Debian but for some reason Debian's net install kept failing so I decided to just grab the Ubuntu image and start playing with it.

There was nothing special about getting Clojure to run on the beagleboard, apt-get to install OpenJDK and lein to handle Clojure installation. Below is a simple benchmark to give you an idea about its performance. Keep in mind that even though the xM has a 1 GHz CPU, Ubuntu kernel does not have the digital voltage scaling patches so the board was running at 500 MHz.

(ns benchmark.core)

(defn factorial [x]
  (reduce * (range 1 (inc x))))

(defn fib [n] 
  (if (<= n 1) 
    1
    (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))

(defn sort-seq []
  (sort (repeat 100000 (rand-int 2000000))))

(defn time-it [fn]
  (let [values  (for [i (range 200)] (with-out-str (time (fn))))
	doubles (map #(Double. (nth (.split % " ") 2)) values)]
    (/ (apply + doubles) (count doubles))))

(defn -main []
  (println "(factorial 5000) \t Avg: " (time-it #(factorial 5000)))
  (println "(fib 20) \t Avg: " (time-it #(fib 20)))
  (println "(sort-seq) \t Avg: " (time-it #(sort-seq))))

ubuntu@omap:~/benchmark$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_18"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.8.5) (6b18-1.8.5-0ubuntu1)
OpenJDK Zero VM (build 14.0-b16, mixed mode)
ubuntu@omap:~/benchmark$ lein run
(factorial 5000)         Avg:  972.1499634100002
(fib 20)         Avg:  258.30398559000014
(sort-seq)       Avg:  4483.578033390005