I was just wondering...is curiosity not a valid reason to do things anymore? I didn't want to make any assumptions. It also lead me to thinking I might want to grab the greatest of a larger list of numbers, let's say I change my array to search to have 100 values. Taking out the ternary, which doesn't quite apply in this new context, here are the results:

         Rate sort2  sort  loop  List
sort2  3380/s    --   -9%  -81%  -94%
sort   3725/s   10%    --  -79%  -93%
loop  17454/s  416%  369%    --  -67%
List  53227/s 1475% 1329%  205%    --
[download]

Lastly, it's a meditation. Food for thought. I'm not trying to cure cancer here but you never know.

List::Util: you forgot to read the comments. the perl stuff is only compiled if the XS fails to load.