Speeding up the Mandlebrot app

Previously I had some simple code for calculating the Mandelbrot fractal. Unfortunately, it was dog slow.

The primary reason is the use of BufferedImage. This is fine when you're loading an image from a file, but it's a big useless to go through a sequence setting each and every pixel with setRGB.

When you've already got all the data in memory, MemoryImageSource is a much better bet. You can create one with a 1D array of pixel data (with a specified width/height). MemoryImageSource implements the ImageProducer interface which means that any AWT derived component can use createImage to make an Image.

Firstly, I converted over the (x,y) set to just a list of numbers where (given the height and width) you can work out the corresponding pixel index, then I can just apply pmap (see also Ray Tracing)to calculate all the pixels in parallel.

(defn calculate-pixels []
  (let [pixels (range 0 (* *width* *height*))]
    (pmap (fn [p] 
            (let [row (rem p *width*) col (int (/ p *height*))]
              (get-color (process-pixel (/ row (double *width*)) (/ col (double *height*))))))
          

Next we need the interop to go from my sequence of pixel values to an integer array.

(defn simple-mandlebrot [w h]
  (let [x (int-array (calculate-pixels))]
    

int-array converts between a list of integers to a plain old Java array. I could probably use a Java Array for the whole thing, and not use seq, but I doubt this is an appreciable performance difference.

These changes have made a huge difference, instead of taking minutes to render a 512x512 image it takes a few seconds and all my CPU cores are occupied.