Jim C. Nasby wrote:
http://stats.distributed.net used to use a perl script to do some
transformations before loading data into the database. IIRC, when we
switched to using C we saw 100x improvement in speed, so I suspect that
if you want performance perl isn't the way to go. I think you can
compile perl into C, so maybe that would help some.

I use Perl extensively, and have never seen a performance problem.  I suspect the 
perl-to-C "100x improvement" was due to some other factor, like a slight change 
in the schema, indexes, or the fundamental way the client (C vs Perl) handled the data 
during the transformation, or just plain bad Perl code.

Modern scripting languages like Perl and Python make programmers far, far more 
productive than the bad old days of C/C++.  Don't shoot yourself in the foot by 
reverting to low-level languages like C/C++ until you've exhausted all other 
possibilities.  I only use C/C++ for intricate scientific algorithms.

In many cases, Perl is *faster* than C/C++ code that I write, because I can't 
take the time (for example) to write the high-performance string manipulation 
that have been fine-tuned and extensively optimized in Perl.

Craig


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