I'm new to julia so I would welcome some advice to improve the following function,
using SpecialFunctions
function rb(x, nu_max)
bj = Array{Complex64}(length(x), nu_max)
nu = 0.5 + (0:nu_max)
# somehow dot broadcast isn't happy
# bj .= [ besselj(_nu,_x)*sqrt(pi/2*_x) for _nu in nu, _x in x]
bj = [ besselj(_nu,_x)*sqrt(pi/2*_x) for _nu in nu, _x in x]
end
rb(1.0:0.1:2.0, 500)
basically, I'm not quite sure what's the recommended way to get a matrix over these two parameters (x and nu). The documentation doesn't offer much information, but I understand that the underlying fortran routine internally loops over nu, so I'd rather not do it again in the interest of performance.
Edit: I'm asked about the goal; it's to compute the Riccati-Bessel functions $j_1(x,\nu),h_1(x,\nu)$ for multiple values of $x$ and $\nu$.
I've stripped down stylistic questions from the original version to focus on this core issue.
This is a great example where you can take full advantage of broadcasting. It looks like you want the cartesian product between x and nu, where the rows are populated by the values of nu and the columns are x. This is exactly what broadcasting can do — you just need to reshape x such that it's a single row across many columns:
julia> using SpecialFunctions
julia> x = 1.0:0.1:2.0
1.0:0.1:2.0
julia> nu = 0.5 + (0:500)
0.5:1.0:500.5
# this shows how broadcast works — these are the arguments and their location in the matrix
julia> tuple.(nu, reshape(x, 1, :))
501×11 Array{Tuple{Float64,Float64},2}:
(0.5, 1.0) (0.5, 1.1) … (0.5, 1.9) (0.5, 2.0)
(1.5, 1.0) (1.5, 1.1) (1.5, 1.9) (1.5, 2.0)
(2.5, 1.0) (2.5, 1.1) (2.5, 1.9) (2.5, 2.0)
(3.5, 1.0) (3.5, 1.1) (3.5, 1.9) (3.5, 2.0)
⋮ ⋱ ⋮
(497.5, 1.0) (497.5, 1.1) (497.5, 1.9) (497.5, 2.0)
(498.5, 1.0) (498.5, 1.1) (498.5, 1.9) (498.5, 2.0)
(499.5, 1.0) (499.5, 1.1) (499.5, 1.9) (499.5, 2.0)
(500.5, 1.0) (500.5, 1.1) … (500.5, 1.9) (500.5, 2.0)
julia> bj = besselj.(nu,reshape(x, 1, :)).*sqrt.(pi/2*reshape(x, 1, :))
501×11 Array{Float64,2}:
0.841471 0.891207 0.932039 … 0.9463 0.909297
0.301169 0.356592 0.414341 0.821342 0.870796
0.0620351 0.0813173 0.103815 0.350556 0.396896
0.00900658 0.0130319 0.0182194 0.101174 0.121444
⋮ ⋱ ⋮
0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
0.0 0.0 0.0 … 0.0 0.0