One of the best replies I've read in weeks! I wish I could up this more than once.

I fully recognize your path. I also worked with (even older) perl on AIX, and when I had to, I always wanted I could do it faster (any other system gave me more vivid response). But I must say that newer AIX also gave newer perl a better architecture to work on. I still hate AIX, but I must say that I hate AIX 5.3 a lot less than I hat AIX 3.1 but I still prefer Linux or HP-UX over AIX in any case.

And I never ever even consider using C over perl to gain performance. If I have to micro-optimize heavily visited perl code that actually warrants C, I'll write it in XS. That is a proven path (see e.g. the speed comparison between Text::CSV_XS versus Text::CSV_PP), but it has the huge advantage of easy integration into the whole of the perl script.

Also note that if you have to access databases in C, none of the code is portable between databases. All have their own API and edge cases one has to code around. The low maintenance level of perl scripts using DBI instead is one huge selling point of using perl from the start.