gcd: Greatest common divisor and smallest common multiple

In cheapr: Simple Functions to Save Time and Memory

Greatest common divisor and smallest common multiple

Description

Fast greatest common divisor and smallest common multiple using the Euclidean algorithm.

gcd() returns the greatest common divisor.
scm() returns the smallest common multiple.
gcd2() is a vectorised binary version of gcd.
scm2() is a vectorised binary version of scm.

Usage

gcd(
  x,
  tol = sqrt(.Machine$double.eps),
  na_rm = TRUE,
  round = TRUE,
  break_early = TRUE
)

scm(x, tol = sqrt(.Machine$double.eps), na_rm = TRUE)

gcd2(x, y, tol = sqrt(.Machine$double.eps), na_rm = TRUE)

scm2(x, y, tol = sqrt(.Machine$double.eps), na_rm = TRUE)

Arguments

x	A numeric vector.
tol	Tolerance. This must be a single positive number strictly less than 1.
na_rm	If TRUE the default, NA values are ignored.
round	If TRUE the output is rounded as round(gcd, digits) where digits is ceiling(abs(log10(tol))) + 1. This can potentially reduce floating point errors on further calculations. The default is TRUE.
break_early	This is experimental and applies only to floating-point numbers. When TRUE the algorithm will end once gcd > 0 && gcd < 2 * tol. This can offer a tremendous speed improvement. If FALSE the algorithm finishes once it has gone through all elements of x. The default is TRUE. For integers, the algorithm always breaks early once gcd > 0 && gcd <= 1.
y	A numeric vector.

Details

Method

GCD (Greatest Common Divisor)

The GCD is calculated using a binary function that takes input GCD(gcd, x[i + 1]) where the output of this function is passed as input back into the same function iteratively along the length of x. The first gcd value is x[1].

Zeroes are handled in the following way:
GCD(0, 0) = 0
GCD(a, 0) = a

This has the nice property that zeroes are essentially ignored.

SCM (Smallest Common Multiple)

This is calculated using the GCD and the formula is:
SCM(x, y) = (abs(x) / GCD(x, y) ) * abs(y)

If you want to calculate the gcd & lcm for 2 values or across 2 vectors of values, use gcd2 and scm2.

A note on performance

A very common solution to finding the GCD of a vector of values is to use Reduce() along with a binary function like gcd2().
e.g. Reduce(gcd2, seq(5, 20, 5)).
This is exactly identical to gcd(seq(5, 20, 5)), with gcd() being much faster and overall cheaper as it is written in C++ and heavily optimised. Therefore it is recommended to always use gcd().

For example we can compare the two approaches below,
x <- seq(5L, length = 10^6, by = 5L)
bench::mark(Reduce(gcd2, x), gcd(x))
This example code shows gcd() being ~200x faster on my machine than the Reduce + gcd2 approach, even though gcd2 itself is written in C++ and has little overhead.

Value

A number representing the GCD or SCM.

Examples

library(cheapr)
library(bench)

# Binary versions
gcd2(15, 25)
gcd2(15, seq(5, 25, 5))
scm2(15, seq(5, 25, 5))
scm2(15, 25)

# GCD across a vector
gcd(c(0, 5, 25))
mark(gcd(c(0, 5, 25)))

x <- rnorm(10^5)
gcd(x)
gcd(x, round = FALSE)
mark(gcd(x))

cheapr documentation built on Aug. 8, 2025, 6:06 p.m.