Perl (or Unix vs. MS, actually)

pll at lanminds.com pll at lanminds.com
Tue Aug 20 16:30:24 EDT 2002


In a message dated: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 15:16:58 CDT
Thomas Charron said:

>> I do occasionally use Perl, but I find that it's usually when I want
>> to do a lot of regexp work, or shell-script-like work, but don't want
>> to take the performance hit of using a shell script.  Otherwise, bash
>> or C suit me better.
>
>  Performance hit.  Thats kinda funny.  And what kind of benchmarks have you 
>performed as a basis for this judgement?  I guess I dont see what this means, 
>as to why you do it.

Well, in Derek's defense, using perl for something similarly written 
in bash is likely to perform better since bash or any of the 
traditionall 'shell' languages need to spawn a separate process for 
everything.

For example, in shell, the construct:

	cd /tmp && rm foo

creates 2 sub-shell processes, whereas, in perl:

	chdir (/tmp) && unlink(foo);

creates 0 sub-shell processes.  Therefore, perl is, technically, more 
efficient in this regard.  Does it really matter with todays 
ridiculously overpowered CPUs and gobs of memory?  Probably not in 
most cases.

Though, perl does have a debugger one can use vs. bash which doesn't.
That right there is a plus in the perl column for me! :)
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
--
	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
   but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.

	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!





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