Welcome back to p6i. ;)
At 08:12 PM 3/9/2004 -0800, Brent \"Dax\" Royal-Gordon wrote:
On a platform with a halfway decent JIT, a pure-PASM implementation could be as fast as an op-based one, given liberal use of the non-PMC
Agree.
Besides, how fast does your date handling really need to be? I mean, *really*? Are you formatting eleventy billion dates in a tight loop or something?
I actually have Perl programs that parse many many millions of billing records per day (with 2 dates per record) for certain wireless companies.
Sometimes, if the customer wants to do an audit, we have to process
over a month's worth, so we are bound by the actual execution
time of the Perl script and the access time of a Sleepycat (Berkeley DB)
database. The Perl programs must be able to scale
with call/message volume, and right now the only thing we can do to
improve it is put faster processors on it. (We have 8-way boxes with
64GB RAM, so 4GB hashes work just fine, but 1.5 hrs per day is still very finite
when you have to baby sit scripts for a week to give customers the answers
they want to know). Granted, I could rewrite this stuff in C, but we typically
modify these things on very short notice and Perl gives us the flexibility
to react quickly.
So, when we are discussing dates, I am one very interested party.
-Melvin
PS: Sorry I'm so vague about the numbers. The customers are very sensitive about those numbers and I could get in trouble, but lets say they are in the billions for a rather small time sample.
