Well that sounds very nice, but during my recent encounter with DBD::SQLite I got a new question: is the move worth it? I don't mind all the syntactic sugar - it's all very fine but even Perl 5.005 had it more than enough for me to study and master for another ten years.
You seem to reduce the changes between perl 5.8 and 5.14 to two categories: speed and syntactic sugar.
But there are lots of other changes between those versions, which IMHO make the upgrade very worthwhile, even if it comes with a slight speed penalty. If you upgrade from 5.8 to 5.14, you get for example:
- A module installer that actually works most of the time
- Lots of bug fixes
- Support
- The capability to install many modules. Quite a few of the modules that don't depend on 5.10 or newer directly do (often indirectly) depend on newer versions of core modules, and upgrading core modules has always been a delicate business.
- A regex engine that doesn't segfault when you provide it with too long strings
- Greatly improved Unicode handling
- Unicode handling in the Pod tools
- Warnings in the case of undefined behavior (for example my in statement-modifying conditionals)
- Trie regex optimizations that speed up alternatives of literal strings by a big amount
Plus lots of features that you probably discount as "syntactic sugar".
That said, I'd be interested in a performance comparison for some real-world applications that not only loop over arrays and assign undef to some elements, but do some more interesting stuff, like matching non-trivial regexes, doing IO with IO layers, index into Unicode strings and so on.
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: |
| & | | & |
| < | | < |
| > | | > |
| [ | | [ |
| ] | | ] |
Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.