Unless you are making a production system, application, or library that will be run many, many times, programmer productivity is probably more important than code efficiency.

A point that hasn't been brought up here yet is that it also depends on how high-level your algorithms are. If you are working with an executable grammar, multilevel hashes, elaborate RegEx expressions, or other such abstractions, you're almost certainly better off letting the language do the work.

The only languages which may have a real performance benefit over Perl are C and C++, but you have to be careful there because C++ efficiency requires a lot of implementation understanding that's deeper than most programmers care to go. Likewise, C pointer usage can blow Perl away... IF it works. Once again, the higher the level of abstraction, the less advantage C++ or C will have.

Raw compiled C is almost certainly fastest... but how much time are you willing to devote to building your own libraries? Handling your own memory management? Parsing strings? Porting code to another architecture?

In reply to Re: Perl vs. Compilable Language by samizdat
in thread Perl vs. Compilable Language by jpk236

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