shell, perl, performance, parallelism, profiling, etc.

[Kevin D. Clark]

Jerry Feldman writes:

> However, my thought is that if you are concerned with the
> performance of a shell or Perl script, then you have the wrong
> language, and should consider a more traditional compiled
> language. On the BLU server, we had a script that would convert
> mailman passwords to htpasswords. The shell script took many minuted
> (I think it was over 30 at the time) where I rewrote it in C++, and
> it took something like seconds. Scripts, whether written in BASH,
> CSH, or Perl are very useful, but they have their place. I've seen
> whole applications written entirely in scripts (Unixshell, Perl,
> DCL), but once performance becomes an issue then you really need a
> binary solution.

I kind-of agree with this, but on the other hand, I'm sure you'll
agree with me when I state that "before you throw out an interpreted
implementation of a program, you owe it to yourself to ensure that
you're at least using at least using a reasonably efficient
algorithm".

I.e. bubblesort written in Perl is going to get clobbered by shellsort
written in C.

Regards,

--kevin
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