List::Util (the XS version) beats them all:

               Rate  recursive recursive2       eval  iterative   list
+util
recursive    1244/s         --        -4%       -68%       -97%      -
+100%
recursive2   1297/s         4%         --       -67%       -97%      -
+100%
eval         3930/s       216%       203%         --       -91%       
+-99%
iterative   42708/s      3332%      3192%       987%         --       
+-85%
listutil   281788/s     22544%     21622%      7071%       560%       
+  --

[download]
use warnings;
use strict;
use Benchmark qw/cmpthese/;
use List::Util::XS;
use List::Util qw/sum/;

my @array = 1..1000;
my $expect = sum(@array);

{
    use feature 'current_sub';
    no warnings 'recursion';
    sub SumArryRcs
        { 1==@_?$_[0]:1>@_?die:shift(@_)+__SUB__->(@_) }
    sub SumArryRcs2
        { @_ ? shift(@_) + __SUB__->(@_) : 0 }
}

cmpthese(-1, {
    iterative => sub {
        my $agg = 0;
        $agg += $_ for @array;
        $agg == $expect or die;
    },
    recursive =>
        sub { SumArryRcs(@array) == $expect or die },
    recursive2 =>
        sub { SumArryRcs2(@array) == $expect or die },
    eval =>
        sub { eval(join "+", @array) == $expect or die },
    listutil =>
        sub { sum(@array) == $expect or die },
});

[download]

The recursive approach is not a good solution, as I had to disable warnings on deep recursion and as the array gets longer it really blows up... only for short arrays does it outperform the eval version.

In reply to Re: Best way to sum an array? by haukex
in thread Best way to sum an array? by Anonymous Monk

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