Many of the optimizations make it hard to debug the program. Most of us don't debug the perl binary, so that's a non-issue.

There are cases where optimization can break code. This is one good reason to have a good test suite. Usually it happens around particularly hairy code (IIRC, Duff's Device tends to trip up optimizers).

Also, higher optimization levels may start trading off time for space, which might make someone still running Perl on an old VAX angry.

In the general case of a regular Perl programmer, running on a reasonably up-to-date machine, higher optimization is fine.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

In reply to Re^2: How to make your Perl 30% faster by hardburn
in thread How to make your Perl 30% faster by PetaMem

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