On Wednesday 05 May 2010 10:25:48 Craig DeForest wrote: > Jarle, > > Neat stuff. > > The PDL/IDL split has been known anecdotally for a long time -- the PP > engine really does well at generating vector code, and RSI have long > touted the efficiency of IDL vector code. Both languages are probably > RAM bound and not significantly different in speed when they are > inside large(r than cache) vector operations. > > IDL's interpreter, on the other hand, really blows chunks compared to > Perl's. It's not legally possible to know what IDL is doing, but I > suspect it merely tokenizes, rather than JIT-compiling, the > interpreted code, so the interpreter has to do a lot more work at run- > time (work that Perl caches up-front).
Just a nitpick - perl 5 does not do JIT-compilation either. In JIT compilation one converts the internal bytecode (also called P-code) to machine language at run-time so it will later execute faster. That's what the JVM and the .NET CLR are doing, but perl 5 (the Perl 5 implementation) does not do it, at least not yet. See: * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-code_machine * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation > > The python curve is (as Daniel pointed out) surprising - folks in my > office keep advocating switching to Python, largely because it is > alleged to be screamingly fast. I'm not enough of a python guy to > know if there are simple optimizations that are being ignored... > Well, the common belief is that the default CPython implementation (which most people are using) is roughly as fast as perl 5 is, with various benchmarks being somewhat in favour of this or the other, but usually not a very dramatic difference. This is while ruby-1.8.x is much slower than both. On the other hand, Python has many alternative implementations: Jython (for the JVM), IronPython (for .NET), Psycho, stackless Python, etc. and some of them may perform better than CPython. As a result, I'm not sure of the origin of Python's alleged reputation of being "screamingly fast" and what is the grain of truth in it. Regards, Shlomi Fish > Cheers, > Craig > -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ "The Human Hacking Field Guide" - http://shlom.in/hhfg God considered inflicting XSLT as the tenth plague of Egypt, but then decided against it because he thought it would be too evil. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
