On Jan 8, 2009, at 12:27 PM, Sam Seaver wrote:
On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 11:24 AM, Sherm Pendley <sherm.pend...@gmail.com
> wrote:
On Jan 7, 2009, at 10:36 PM, Vic Norton wrote:
Another curiosity. I just checked out the Perl5.8.8 files in /usr/
bin and
/opt/local/bin. The /usr/bin one came with Leopard, which I bought
from
Apple a week or so ago. It was created on Dec 7, 2007, and it
weighs 48 KB.
The MacPorts perl was created on Sep 5, 2008, and weighs 1.1 MB.
Why, I
wonder, should one Perl5.8.8 be 25 times as big as another?
MacPorts' perl is probably built with a static libperl. Apple's is
built
with a dynamic libperl.
Would this mean that one version is 'faster' than the other?
Apple has build-time information from building the entire OS that
allows them to use prebinding on their libperl. That made a big
difference on pre-Tiger releases, where non-prebound dynamic libraries
carried a hefty performance penalty. Since most of us don't have the
info that Apple has, Perl defaults to building a static libperl on
Darwin. Apple overrides the default with "-Duseshrplib" for their build.
In Tiger and newer, the dynamic loader is much improved and the
reliance on prebinding eliminated. But Perl still defaults to building
a static libperl, basically out of inertia.
sherm--
