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Dear fellow monks,

I got a new programming task at work now, and wonder what is the best language/platform to code it in.

The task consists mostly of reading huge binary files (~100 MB), divided to 128 bit chunks, and raving through this heap of bits looking for certain patterns, and validating some information. An additional need is doing some ASCII file work, comparing things, reporting things and reading configurations. There's also have to be some GUI.

My main concern with Perl is speed. I fear that processing binary data in Perl is not fast enough to accomplish the tasks in some normal time. Therefore, I also consider C. But the argument against C is that I'll have to code a GUI (Perl/Tk) and do some text file processing, in which Perl is definitely superior.

If I'll choose Perl eventually, are there any good advice for me ? Any useful CPAN modules ? How is it best to handle 128 bit binary frames in Perl ? How is it best to read such a file ? All of it to memory ? But how ?

Hoping for insights and advices :-)

In reply to is perl the best tool for this job ? by spurperl

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