Counting elements that satisfy property

Suppose we wish to count the number of positive integers in some array. We might write the following:

let number_pos (xs: []i32) =
  length (filter (>0) xs)

This is inefficient, because the program will manifest the result of the filter in memory. A better solution is to rewrite this as a map-reduce composition, where we turn positive integers into 1 and others into 0:

let number_pos_better (xs: []i32) =
  i64.sum (map (\x -> if x > 0 then 1 else 0) xs)

This is much more efficient, because the map can be fused into the reduce that is used to implement i64.sum.

We can write it more concisely by using a built-in function to convert booleans to integers:

let number_pos_best (xs: []i32) =
  i64.sum (map ((>0) >-> i64.bool) xs)

And of course, we can factor all of this into a handy function:

let count p xs =
  i64.sum (map (p >-> i64.bool) xs)

And now we can define our original function as follows:

let count_number_pos (xs: []i32) =
  count (>0) xs

Counting elements that satisfy property

See also