If your goal is to write a program that is optimized for both speed and memory, Perl is a horrible choice of language. There are a million reasons to choice Perl to program in, but it seldomly is the best choice if execution speed needs to be optimized (although usually its execution speed is good enough). And it's never the appropriate choice when it comes to optimize the memory footprint. Compared to say C, Perl is slow (but that has nothing to do with compiled vs interpreted - it all has to do with the flexibility Perl gives you. Flexibility comes with a price). And while perl is skillfully tweaked to do as many optimizations as possible, it usually does so by requesting more memory from the OS.