Shouldn't smartmatch outrun string interpolation at that task?

I'd say probably not. Smartmatch is as generic as possible and without knowing the implementation details my expectation would be that the more generic method would be slower. Anyway, since smartmatch is experimental I wouldn't be using it in code intended to be stable. YMMV.

And which methods are fastest to accomplish comparison?

That will almost certainly depend on your corpus. If your arrays differ in the first element then any iterative comparison will beat a whole-array one hands down, for example. As usual, the way to be sure is to benchmark against representative sample data.

Hello rsFalse,

I am not an expert on this area so I will leave another Monk more experienced to answer your question.

I found this older question (fastest way to compare two arrays) that contains a few suggestions. Would you give it a try and time them also?

Hope this helps, BR.

I'm not especially surprised that string interpolation is faster. If you want the absolute fastest way, I imagine that a custom function written in XS would be fastest. I might have a play with that idea and see what I can find out.

An Inline::C implementation runs about three times faster than the string interpolation version for integer comparison, and about 2.5 times faster for string comparisons.

use v5.16;
use strict;
use warnings;
use Inline 'C';

sub arrays_same_pp {
    "@{$_[0]}" eq "@{$_[1]}";
}

our @x = map { int(rand() * 1_000_000) } 1..10;
our @y = @x;

use Benchmark 'cmpthese';

cmpthese -1, {
    PP  => '::arrays_same_pp(\@::x, \@::y)',
    XS  => '::arrays_same_i(\@::x, \@::y)',
};

__END__
__C__

int arrays_same_i (SV* x, SV* y) {
    AV* arrx = (AV*)SvRV(x);
    AV* arry = (AV*)SvRV(y);
    
    if (arrx == arry) {
        return 2;
    }
    
    int len = av_len(arrx);
    if (len != av_len(arry)) {
        return 0;
    }
    
    int i;
    for (i=0; i<=len; i++) {
        SV** elemx = av_fetch(arrx, i, 0);
        SV** elemy = av_fetch(arry, i, 0);
        int ix = SvIV(*elemx);
        int iy = SvIV(*elemy);
        if (ix != iy) {
            return 0;
        }
    }
    
    return 1;
}

int arrays_same_s (SV* x, SV* y) {
    AV* arrx = (AV*)SvRV(x);
    AV* arry = (AV*)SvRV(y);
    
    if (arrx == arry) {
        return 2;
    }
    
    int len = av_len(arrx);
    if (len != av_len(arry)) {
        return 0;
    }
    
    int i;
    for (i=0; i<=len; i++) {
        SV** elemx = av_fetch(arrx, i, 0);
        SV** elemy = av_fetch(arry, i, 0);
        STRLEN dummy;
        char* strx = SvPV(*elemx, dummy);
        char* stry = SvPV(*elemy, dummy);
        if (strcmp(strx, stry) != 0) {
            return 0;
        }
    }
    
    return 1;
}
[download]

I might clean this up and release to CPAN if there's nothing similar already there.

toby döt ink

Can you say a few words as to how this compiles?