I've never had a need to benchmark Perl vs. something else, though I imagine there could be something faster.

However, I think you have to take into account the time needed for development. This is not an insignificant factor, and often outweighs the costs of running more slowly. In the olden days, memory and cycles were quite expensive, so the time spent by programmers to squeeze out a few more bytes or milliseconds was well spent. Now machines are faster, memory is cheap, and the expensive part has become the programmers.

Often it becomes a question of how much it would cost to develop something a bit faster, vs. how much it costs to run a slower program. In many cases, it's much cheaper to have the program take a little more time, than to try to implement it in a more difficult language.

In reply to Re: PerlIO slower than traditional IO? by spiritway
in thread PerlIO slower than traditional IO? by saintmike

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.