C++17

Transform-reduce is a pattern in which a set of data is first modified by applying a transformation on each of the elements and then it is reduced to a single value. In C++, this can be implemented straightforwardly with std::transform and std::accumulate. In C++17, an alternative for std::accumulate is available; std::reduce sums a range of elements just like std::accumulate, except that it does so out of order. That means you cannot use it with operators that are not communicative or associative (including overloads of operator+ that don’t exhibit these properties). On the other hand, there is yet another algorithm called std::transform_reduce that applies a functor to all the elements of a range and then reduces them, all in an out of order manner. And then, there are also parallel versions of these algorithms. In this post, I will try to compare the performance of these possible alternatives for implementing transform-reduce.