Playing with lazy-seq

Played a little with lazy-seq vs loop recur today, and got a suprise that lazy-seq is not as slow as I would have thought. Most likely the usecases are very different so by no means is this interchangably for most applications, but I assumed that a lazy-seq carries a lot of overhead. Don’t know why I thought that so, but playing around with it and timing the output I realized it seems to be a wrong assumption. By no means this is a real benchmark but it makes me read up more for sure.

(defn fib
  "Return the Nth fibonacci number."
  [n]
  (loop [i n
         p 0
         pp 1]
    (if (zero? i)
      p
      (recur (dec i) (+ pp p) p))))

(defn lazy-fib
  "Return the fibonacci sequence as a lazy sequence."
  ([] (lazy-fib 0 1))
  ([p pp] (lazy-seq (cons p (lazy-fib pp (+ p pp))))))


(let [n 60]
  (println "Nth number:")
  (time (fib n))
  (println "Non lazy:")
  (time (last (take n (map fib (range)))))
  (println "Lazy:")
  (time (last (take n (lazy-fib)))))

;; Nth number:
;; "Elapsed time: 0.022058 msecs"
;; Non lazy:
;; "Elapsed time: 0.133195 msecs"
;; Lazy:
;; "Elapsed time: 0.026575 msecs"

Seems like lazy-seq is at least same order of magnitude to just calculating N for fibonacci here, and creating a non lazy seq seems much slower. No optimization what so ever here, and also being pretty brute force about the recursion in the lazy-fib.