Ecosystem

This package contains a number (currently 5) alternative implementations of a simple agent based simulation. The difference is mostly in the type signature of the World:

• World{Dict{Int64, Union{Animal{🐑}, Plant{🌿}}}} is a plain Dict of Unions.
• World{Dict{Int64, Union{Animal{🐑, ♀}, Animal{🐑, ♂}, Plant{🌿}}}} is a dict of unions with additional type parameter in the animal.
• World{@NamedTuple{Sheep::Dict{Int64, Animal{🐑}}, Grass::Dict{Int64, Plant{🌿}}}} is a tuple of dictionaries where the dictionaries have concrete types.
• World{@NamedTuple{SheepFemale::Dict{Int64, Animal{🐑, ♀}}, SheepMale::Dict{Int64, Animal{🐑, ♂}}, Grass::Dict{Int64, Plant{🌿}}}} - same as above just with Animal{A,S}.
• World{Dict{Int64, Agent}} where Agent is a DynamicSumType. Uses the animal with two type parameters Animal{A,S}.

The dict of union approach is the slowest, the named tuples are the fastest (by far - note the units). DynamicSumTypes.jl are 3-5x faster than the dict of union while not making the World type as complicated as it is with the named tuples.

Benchmarks

	v1.10	v1.11
ParametricSpeciesDictUnion/find_food	0.242 ± 0.011 ms	0.215 ± 0.01 ms
ParametricSpeciesDictUnion/reproduce	0.562 ± 0.32 ms	0.568 ± 0.36 ms
ParametricSpeciesSexSumType/find_food	0.0502 ± 0.0084 ms	0.0525 ± 0.0023 ms
ParametricSpeciesSexSumType/reproduce	0.116 ± 0.078 ms	0.124 ± 0.081 ms
ParametricSpeciesSexDictUnion/find_food	0.206 ± 0.011 ms	0.214 ± 0.0057 ms
ParametricSpeciesSexDictUnion/reproduce	0.487 ± 0.28 ms	0.457 ± 0.29 ms
ParametricSpeciesNTtuple/find_food	2.75 ± 2.8 μs	2.79 ± 2.9 μs
ParametricSpeciesNTtuple/reproduce	0.103 ± 0.099 ms	0.0938 ± 0.1 ms
ParametricSpeciesSexNTuple/find_food	2.75 ± 2.8 μs	2.71 ± 2.8 μs
ParametricSpeciesSexNTuple/reproduce	0.042 ± 0.001 μs	0.042 ± 0.001 μs

To produce the table above:

make benchpkg
make benchpkgtable