On Thu, 8 Sep 2005, Nigel Metheringham wrote: > However perl is normally pretty fast for regexp application (especially > as you do need to do all that horrid UTF8 stuff) although there are > cases that go really nasty.
Well, all I can say is that when I feed the PCRE pattern matching tests to Perl, they run much more slowly. This is the main test, which has 704 different patterns, with various numbers of data lines: Using pcretest: real 0m0.003s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.001s Using Perl: real 0m1.000s user 0m0.974s sys 0m0.007s However, I haven't taken any measures to optimize the Perl (for example, it probably recompiles each pattern for each match). Therefore, these are "worst case" figures which no doubt could be improved. Nevertheless, I would not expect Perl ever to be able to catch up: it is, after all, essentially an interpreted language. You cannot expect it to be as fast as compiled code. Even a few percent can be important when millions of regex matches are happening. -- Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714. Get the Exim 4 book: http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book -- ## List details at http://www.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://www.exim.org/eximwiki/
