Note that on some platforms Perl's I/O is faster than C's buffered I/O (about twice as fast) which probably means it will be faster than Java's I/O. On other platforms, Perl's buffered I/O is about 1/2 as fast as C's buffered I/O. Linux is one of the platforms were Perl's I/O is slow.

If "perl -V" reports "d_stdstdio=define", then Perl's I/O is probably fast on your platform.

So your friend picked one of the things that Perl can be very fast at because Perl does really scary hacks to make I/O fast but only on platforms where the Configure tests show that those scary hacks actually work.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")