Booking.com have published a new blog entry:

"A recent Booking.com hackathon provided us the opportunity to investigate speeding up integer allocation in the Perl interpreter. If successful, this could optimize nearly every program we run. We discovered that a naive implementation could work, but would make the code a lot more difficult to maintain. Our path lead us to attempt to leverage the C preprocessor to improve code clarity while opening doors to real gains in program execution speed."