Perl optimizations are pretty basic, and it compiles fast - which is great for utility scripts, but sometimes it feels like a waste of potential. A lot of Perl code actually runs persistently, either behind mod_perl, plack server, mojolicious server or just as a daemon.

I've been thinking - what if we had a switch (executable flag?) that would turn on additional set of compile time optimizations? It could hypothetically be a big performance win, and not affect programs that need to boot fast. I have close to no experience in XSUB, so that's a big if.

For example, one of my projects has I think close to 100 .pm files and compiles in 800 ms. It will then run for a long time (in production) and require performance. Other than testing and development, I wouldn't mind spending 10 seconds extra if that would mean some crucial parts would run 50% faster. Or maybe I could care less about using small subroutines in tight loops, as they would get inlined.

Comments? Was it attempted already?

In reply to Trading compile time for faster runtime? by melez

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.