in reply to What is Perl *NOT* good at?

I often use Perl for heavy I/O tasks - processing gigabytes worth of logs, for instance.

I agree on realtime, as long as it's hard realtime like process control, where you need to know average and maximum times for each program segment. Perl is OK for soft realtime i.e use interaction.

Agree on signals and closed source.

One category I'd add: PalmOS applications. I haven't yet been able to find a Perl that would run on my Tungsten.

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Re: Re: What is Perl *NOT* good at?
by jfroebe (Parson) on Apr 20, 2004 at 20:50 UTC

    I should have said heavy concurrent i/o utilization by multiple threads. sorry about that

    Jason

    No one has seen what you have seen, and until that happens, we're all going to think that you're nuts. - Jack O'Neil, Stargate SG-1

[reply]
      I have several applications using I/O multiplexing written in Perl, such as:

      • a http based queue system (server/client)
      • a gateway for a proprietary billing system.
      I have tested my simple I/O multiplexing based http server against ab (apachebench), and it turns out that the performance is very good.

      I don't see any point for making a claim that Perl is NOT good at this.
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Re: Re: What is Perl *NOT* good at?
by DrHyde (Prior) on Apr 21, 2004 at 08:38 UTC
    PalmOS applications

    You won't use perl for applications on a platform for which it's not available? Surely not! ;-) Well yeah, I suppose I wouldn't consider perl for a CP/M application either. I guess I'll just have to stick with BCPL.

    I *do* use perl as part of the build process for my PalmOS apps. There's a nice set of modules (which unfortunately CPAN.pm doesn't like installing) for creating and manipulating Palm databases, so a few lines of perl is enough to slurp data from tha intarweb, parse it, and stuff into databases which my Palm app (written in C) can use.

    Surprisingly, one of the areas that I don't use perl much is one which many people seem to think it excels at - one-liners. I'll just use the shell. Here, for example, is how I get a unique list of all the IPs which my mail sewer has refused to talk to today: 

    grep "connection from" /var/log/exim/mainlog| \
grep "refused$"|awk '{print $6}'|sed 's/\[//;s/\]//'| \
sort|uniq

    [download]
    The great thing about doing tasks like this in the shell as opposed to in perl is that really it's just applying a succession of filters, and the shell imposes minimal extra syntax. And I can never remember the perl command line switches.
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