Re: What is Perl *NOT* good at?

I wouldn't use it for an application that is all about number-crunching or some other CPU intensive task if performance is a serious concern for the application. There have been examples on perlmonks of people who re-wrote a CPU-bound app in C and got major speed gains as a result.

Most of the time, I work on web applications, which are almost never CPU bound. They tend to be I/O bound instead, waiting for a database or something similar, and Perl is very good at that thanks to things like DBI.

Comment on Re: What is Perl NOT good at?

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Re: Re: What is Perl NOT good at? by hv (Prior) on Apr 21, 2004 at 22:30 UTC
Hmm, I quite regularly write intensive number-crunching code in perl - that makes it real easy to prototype and refine (or redefine) the algorithm, and make sure that I know exactly what I'm trying to do before I rewrite it in C. Most times I end up not needing to rewrite it in C. Hugo	[reply]