use Perl

$ perl5.10.0 bench.plx
Benchmark: timing 100000 iterations of first, grep BLOCK, grep EXPR, ~~...

     first: 23 wallclock secs (22.78 usr +  0.03 sys = 22.81 CPU) @ 4384.04/s (n=100000)
grep BLOCK: 18 wallclock secs (18.48 usr +  0.03 sys = 18.51 CPU) @ 5402.49/s (n=100000)
 grep EXPR: 17 wallclock secs (17.56 usr +  0.03 sys = 17.59 CPU) @ 5685.05/s (n=100000)
        ~~: 10 wallclock secs ( 9.97 usr +  0.01 sys =  9.98 CPU) @ 10020.04/s (n=100000)

What I believe it's illustrating is the Perl optimization rule of thumb that the more work you let the opcodes do, the better. ~~ doesn't have to execute a Perl expression over and over again, it can do that in optimized C.

Here's the benchmark code:

use Benchmark;
use 5.010;
use List::Util qw(first);

my @array = map { chr(64+int(rand(26)))."$_" } 1..1000;

timethese(100_000, {
           'first'   => sub {
               my $needle = chr(64+int(rand(26))).int(rand(1000)+1);
               first { $_ eq $needle } @array;
           },
           'grep BLOCK'   => sub {
               my $needle = chr(64+int(rand(26))).int(rand(1000)+1);
               grep { $_ eq $needle } @array;
           },
           'grep EXPR'   => sub {
               my $needle = chr(64+int(rand(26))).int(rand(1000)+1);
               grep $_ eq $needle, @array;
           },
           '~~' => sub {
               my $needle = chr(64+int(rand(26))).int(rand(1000)+1);
               $needle ~~ @array;
           }
});