Perl performs admirably in independant language test

When ignoring memory usage and only focusing on speed, Java placed ahead of Perl in The Great Language Shootout however, when memory usage was factored in, then Perl placed quite high in general and above Java.

What I found interesting is that although functional languages are considered only research vehicles and not useful for real programs, the language Objective CAML has not a few feathers in its cap which might turn a few heads:

It is faster than C++ and only slower than C in the same independent tests
It took both first and second place in the 2000 International Functional Programming Competition and first place in the 1999 contest.

Comment on Perl performs admirably in independant language test

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Re (tilly) 1: Perl performs admirably in independant language test by tilly (Archbishop) on Apr 30, 2001 at 21:31 UTC
Please take with a grain of salt. Take a close look at the overall scorecard. There are a variety of tasks there. On some of these Perl does very poorly. For instance Perl loses on deep recursion. Perl loses on the speed of method calls. On many others there the statement is that all versions must be implemented in the same way. For instance look at the array access example. Perl would improve by a good factor if you replaced the C-style for loop with a Perlish foreach loop. What this means is that, while the page is certainly food for thought, it is not the final word on your speed in your applications...	[reply]
Re: Perl performs admirably in independant language test by mrmick (Curate) on Apr 30, 2001 at 17:48 UTC
I am pleased to see these kind of benchmarks that help to make us aware of how Perl performs in comparison with other languages... I must, however, humbly share this with our Java programmer. I've been telling him that Perl was faster - now I have to eat my (camel)hat. ....Pass the salt... Mick	[reply]
Re: Perl performs admirably in independant language test by hding (Chaplain) on Apr 30, 2001 at 19:29 UTC
Plenty of people think that functional languages are useful for real world tasks. Here's another link for example: Functional Programming in the Real World (a particular example that is often cited is Erlang, used in soft real-time telecommunications applications). For one liberal enough to consider Lisp a functional language, consider also this list of Lisp users.	[reply]