Is Your Script Fast Enough?

By Nuno Carvalho (‎smash‎) from Braga.pm
Date: Wednesday August 13, 2008 15:50
Duration: 30 minutes
Tags: benchmark c java parrot perl python ruby

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Communities and language developers continuously struggle for improving their language features. Stability and speed are two of the most valuable assets languages can aim for in nowadays. Perl has quite a good reputation on both of them. It can be a very reliable and stable interpreter, and doesn't fall much behind in performance when compared with compiled languages. But where do we draw the line which divides the slowest from the fastest? And who has the authority to make this decision? Why should I trust another one's opinion, a possible competitor? These are some unclear issues that hoover around this matter.

Benchmarking is a very common technique used to figure out which computing languages, or algorithms, are faster and which are slower. As every procedure, it is not a flawless one, but when used wisely it can assert very accurate results. In this talk we introduce a couple of simple benchmarking techniques and illustrate them with some practical benchmarks that compare Perl to other programming languages, both compiled and interpreted. Needless is to say, that all results are quite positive for Perl.

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