use Perl

• and option #3 (Score:2)

  by hfb (74)

  why fucking bother? Machines are getting faster and if the legacy code isn't working fast enough, instead of wasting time/money/angst on p5 perhaps migrating to something known for its speed would be a better use of resources. Tilting at windmills is only for the true romantics. As I recall, someone asked the same question a while back and came to the same 'no' conclusion. I also seem to remember Alan Burlison having a few cutting, yet fitting, remarks about squeezing a few more drops of speed out of the
  • Re:and option #3 (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    Machines are getting faster...

    Only the new ones.
    • Re:and option #3 (Score:2)

      by nicholas (3034)

      Also for large systems there comes the tipping point where developer time actually becomes cheaper than the costs of machines, maintenance and rack space. It's these sort of entities who were asking the question.
      • Re:and option #3 (Score:2)

        by hfb (74) on 2006.06.29 21:34 (#48467) Homepage Journal

        As someone who works in a joint with a Sun 25k, I realise that there are slower, cheaper options :) However, at the point where you have the cost of a new machine exceeding the cost of labour, does the speed of the archaic code matter that much and, if it does, doesn't it make more sense to just rewrite it using something else...like C?

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        • Re:and option #3 (Score:2)

          by nicholas (3034)

          It was firms with over 50,000 lines of perl code that were thinking about it, one of which I know is running code across several hundred servers. I doubt that re-writing the whole thing in C (or anything) is easy, as I'm guessing that the cost of validating that the behaviour is the same is prohibitive, but re-writing parts might well be, if those parts can be identified. But I think that both were thinking that it still might be easier to concentrate resources on the core, as that could speed up all code,
          • Re:and option #3 (Score:2)

            by hfb (74)

            Well, with something like that you have to consider so many other possible bottlenecks, especially since much of the clustering software, if that's what they're using, do exact a speed toll. I'd call them outright awful, but a few of them do actually manage to work on occasion.

            And, given the pain and suffering involved with changing most anything in the perl core, *ahem*, I'd guess that rewriting large parts or the whole thing would be faster and far less hassle with a greater performance gain. Anyone w