Benchmark a function
To benchmark our program one of the best ways is to use the BenchmarkTools library of julia. It has 6 main macros that can be used:
@benchmark: generic macro for benchmark
@btime: this executes an expression, printing the time it took to execute and the memory allocated before returning the value of the expression.
@btimed: this macro executes an expression and returns the value of the expression, the minimum elapsed time in seconds, the total bytes allocated, the number of allocations, and the garbage collection time in seconds during the benchmark.
@belapsed: this returns the minimum elapsed time (in seconds) to execute a given expression.
@ballocated: this returns the minimum number of bytes allocated when executing a given expression.
@ballocations: this macro evaluates an expression, discarding the resulting value, and returns the total number of allocations made during its execution.
Each of them supports different optional variables, the most used are usually samples to decide on how many samples the benchmark should be performed, and evals which sets how many evaluations should be performed for each sample