Also, how is Perl any less stable than other languages? Are you saying the language doesn't change much or that it doesn't crash?
time ./startup_time.pl 0.016s
time ./startup_time.py 0.295s
time ./parse_log.pl 0.683s
time ./parse_log.py 1.534s
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use 5.026;
open my $fh, '<', 'logs1.txt';
while (<$fh>) {
chomp;
say if /\b\w{15}\b/;
}
close $fh;
#!/usr/bin/env python
import re
with open('logs1.txt', 'r') as fh:
for line in fh:
if re.search(r'\b\w{15}\b', line): print(line, end='')
Perl5 won the dec2bin benchmark.
The other thing I learned was that PHP's binary/decimal functions are two orders of magnitude slower, despite its core interpreter performance being best-in-class.
It's faster at some things and slower at others. It's fairly similar in speed profile to Python in my eyes.
> Are you saying the language doesn't change much or that it doesn't crash?
Both is probably what was meant. They are literally changing the major version so they can change some backwards compatibility, as Perl has made strong backwards compatibility a goal and selling point for decades. You can take a script written in 2000, and it will likely run without problem if you run it on a Perl 5.30, released last year.
- Cheap: it does not cost much to hire someone to write perl. If they don't know how yet, the choice in style let them be efficient quickly. The code to be deployed is very lightweight, both in CPU and RAM usage.
- Stable: no API break. No new module that reinvent the wheel and breaks your codebase. Unit testing is about everywhere in cpan. Code written 20 years ago still run fine.
That's debatable for single-threaded workloads (they're typically pretty comparable in my observation), and highly unlikely for multi-threaded workloads (Python has a global interpreter lock whereas Perl does not AFAICT; you can work around that in Python, but it typically involves spawning entirely separate processes, thus introducing IPC overhead that wouldn't be present in a Perl equivalent).
Looking at some comparative benchmarks (https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...), Perl seems to be faster in a slight majority of cases, and in nearly all cases has a lower memory overhead. Not that benchmarks really matter anyway, given that they're usually a poor indicator of real-world performance, but still.