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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Google is jading me 8 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • I don't mean to support the opposition, but perl is slow. I mean it's fast at some things, but likely the things you'd need to do to make a process work against their multi-billion document repository just wouldn't be possible in Perl. I guess I'm willing to eat my words if somebody can make it happen, but compared to C++ and Java (yes, Java), Perl is going to get lost in the performance dust (assuming we're talking Perl without XS, and even if you use XS, without Perl data structures).

    Please, prove me wr
    • I can understand thinking that Perl is slow against billions of documents; but so is Java, and C++ isn't much better. I can understand if they wanted to do it in C, but come on, Perl is not going to be "lost in the performance dust" to Java. It just isn't.

      Please, prove me wrong (don't just argue with me!)
      • There's plenty of proof out there that Java can be close to as fast as C++ based stuff. Take parsing as a dead simple example. Perl parsers are really slow - HTML::Parser was ported to XS for this reason, XML::SAX::PurePerl crawls along, etc. Java XML and HTML parsers on the other hand blaze along. Not nearly as fast as C of course, but beating the pants off Perl.

        Part of the problem is Perl only has access to very high level information - strings, hashes, arrays. Whereas C, C++ and Java all have access to
        • No, I don't believe you. Even on your supplied link, perl is faster than Java in wc, network echo, the FIRST hash test, "HELLO WORLD" (!), list processing, regular expressions, spell checking, statistical moments, string concatenation,
          word frequency, and more. Perl is MUCH faster in most of those tests. I don't see by what basis you can think Java is, in your words, "lost in the performance dust."

          And quite literally, this site you linked to disproves your theory, unless you are relying primarily on XML support for it: most of the places Java beats perl in are things that most people probably wouldn't rely on much if at all in the context of this Google contest: object instantiation, exceptions, matrix multiplication. At worst, Perl comes in about even on data processing and manipulation (and probably better). And Perl is also significantly better on memory use.

          So it looks like you're primarily arguing about XML processing ... and that's something I don't care about in the first place.
          • Well I ran the crapshoot scores, with Object instantiation, exceptions and matrix multiplication all turned down to score 1, and Java still beat Perl [bagley.org] overall. I'm trying to find a weighting where Java doesn't beat Perl overall, but I haven't found one yet, at least not one that ignores some things that the systems that most people in the perl community work with and develop every day - Objects, method calls, hash access, regular expressions.

            Play for yourself. I'd love to see what settings Perl comes out o
            • I don't know what most people work with and develop every day, and I don't think you do, either. I don't buy for a moment that this is representative of what most people do (especially how you leave method calls as 5!). Here's one example [bagley.org] of where Perl beats Java, where IMO data manipulation and processing are all much more important than exceptions, object instantiation, method calls, etc.

              And in any event, your claim was not that Java was faster than Perl -- and according to this site, for what I, and
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