One thing to keep in mind is that Perl is hyper-optimized for what it
does. Modules that offer awesome functions may never see inclusion in
the official release if they're too slow. With RB, it seems to me that
you are responsible for any extra optimization, and the framework itself
is much larger. Speaking of that, I'm curious if you're having your RB
app do this in the open event, or triggered via button. The button
method strikes me as a much more accurate test of the actual string
processing, since you've already waited through rendering the window,
loading the other pieces of framework inside that 3MB block, and
whatnot, but that's just me.
Still, as others have noted, Perl was made for this. If you need a
small, very implementation specific task done, it's a great tool for
doing it. As far as byte code compilation vs interpretation, I found
this neat little article:
http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/comp-vs-interp.html
The big advantage RB has, for me, is that it's super easy to use.
Challenge your friend to develop a simple GUI app and time the
development time. Say, a simple database reader with some search
functionality. Test the speed of development and then the speed of the
actual application, and I'm willing to be that you can make a case for
speedy deployment. And, if you walk away from it and come back a year
later, the code components are pretty well laid, allowing a messy coder
a chance at redemption and a neat coder a playground.
Later,
Fargo
Kem Tekinay wrote:
It started with some friendly ribbing. I have a friend who thinks that the
answer to all things is "perl," and he goes on and on about its benefits,
speed, flexibility, etc., etc. Meanwhile, perl code looks to me like
something my cat created when he walked across the keyboard.
Having had enough, and with an actual, simple project to test, I created
equivalent perl and RB apps to process a 100 MB text file. The processing
was fairly simple: If a line was a pure number, a constant string was added
to the beginning of it, otherwise, the text was wrapped in another constant
string and quotes were replaced by double-quotes.
For example, this text:
1
Text 1
2
Text 2
3
Text "3"
Became this text:
case 1
r = "Text 1"
case 2
r = "Text 2"
case 3
r = "Text ""3"""
Imagine my surprise when it took RB a minute to do what perl did in 15
seconds. I'm not surprised that perl is faster, only HOW much faster it is.
My argument was going to be, "see, difference wasn't that much, and RB is
much easier to read," but these results make it no contest.
So my question is: Why is RB so much slower? What is it doing that's making
the difference? And could I do something to close the gap?
The code I used for each is as follows:
perl -lne 'chomp ; if(/^\d+$/){print ('\''case '\'' , $_)} else {s
|\"|\"\"|g ; print("r = \"" , $_ , "\"\n")}' test.txt > perltest.txt
And for REALbasic:
#pragma BackgroundTasks false
#pragma BoundsChecking false
dim fIn, fOut as FolderItem
dim t as Double = microseconds
fIn = DesktopFolder.Child( "test.txt" )
fOut = DesktopFolder.Child( "output.txt" )
dim tIn as TextInputStream = fIn.OpenAsTextFile
dim tOut as TextOutputStream = fOut.CreateTextFile
dim line as string
while not tIn.EOF
line = tIn.ReadLine
if IsNumeric( line ) then
tOut.WriteLine( "case " + line )
else
line = ReplaceAllB( line, """", """""" )
tOut.WriteLine( "r = """ + line + """" + chr( 13 ) )
end if
wend
tIn.Close
tOut.Close
t = microseconds - t
t = t / 1000000
MsgBox( format( t, "#,0.000" ) + " seconds" )
BTW, I also created a version that loaded the whole file at once, split it,
modified it without testing (since I knew that every odd line was a number
and even line text) and dumped it back to a file. That took 24 seconds!
__________________________________________________________________________
Kem Tekinay (212) 201-1465
MacTechnologies Consulting Fax (914) 242-7294
http://www.mactechnologies.com Pager (917) 491-5546
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