I've been using Perl for several years mostly for small to medium sized programs of sysadmim type (automation, gluing, data transformation, log searching). Recently I started to learn Go. I wanted to write something in both languages and compare. Here goes.

The Perl code is more than 2 times smaller:

$ ls -l x.* | perl -lanE 'say "$F[8]\t$F[4] bytes"'
x.go    694 bytes
x.pl    294 bytes
[download]

Perl code is more than 4 times slower when run ...

$ time go run x.go > /dev/null 

real    0m1.222s
user    0m1.097s
sys    0m0.220s

$ time perl x.pl > /dev/null 

real    0m5.358s
user    0m4.778s
sys    0m0.497s
[download]

... and more than 5 times slower when I built the Go code:

$ go build x.go
$ time ./x > /dev/null 

real    0m0.947s
user    0m0.890s
sys    0m0.126s
[download]

The code generates 10 million random integers from 0 to 9. Than it counts the occurrence of each generated integer and prints it.

$ cat x.go
package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "math/rand"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    // Seed the random number generator
    seed := rand.NewSource(time.Now().UnixNano())
    r1 := rand.New(seed)

    // Generate random integers
    var ints []int
    for i := 0; i < 10000000; i++ {
        n := r1.Intn(10)
        ints = append(ints, n)
    }

    // Count ints occurrence
    count := make(map[int]int)
    for _, n := range ints {
        count[n]++
    }

    // Sort ints
    var intsSorted []int
    for n := range count {
        intsSorted = append(intsSorted, n)
    }

    // Print out ints occurrence
    for n := range intsSorted {
        fmt.Printf("%d\t%d\n", n, count[n])
    }
}

$ cat x.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

# Generate random integers
my @ints;
push @ints, int rand 10 for 1 .. 10_000_000;

# Count ints occurrence
my %count;
$count{$_}++ for @ints;

# Print out ints occurrence
for my $int ( sort keys %count ) {
    printf "%d\t%d\n", $int, $count{$int};
}
[download]

In conclusion I must say that I like both languages. I like beer too :-).

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