Maxima/Ecl on 32-bit machine cannot evaluate "apply(union, listify({{..}}))"

> We stopped using xreduce for big unions, since for some our applications it
> > had
> > a big effect --- 5 hours instead of 1 hour where you need to do a lot of
> > experimentations
> > is not good.
> >
> 
> It sounds as though we should improve the performance of xreduce.  In
> particular, it ought to use apply internally up to the limit of the
> underlying implementation, to take full advantage of the underlying
> implementation while keeping the code portable.  By the way, depending on
> the patterns in your data, you may also wish to try lreduce, rreduce, and
> tree_reduce; sometimes there are big differences in the performance of the
> three.
> 
>        l    r    tree
> append 7.63 0.97 0.02 -- [a,b,c]   -- apply will be even faster
> union  3.28 3.12 0.18 -- {random(100)}
> 
>              -s

I see; I'm glad to see that something happens with the set-operations,
so I'll wait a bit what comes out of it, and then will revise my
code accordingly.

Thanks!

Oliver