Because the C code and the Perl code end up doing roughly equivalent things except that the C code runs through a few dozen machine-language instructions while the Perl code runs through a few dozen "opnodes". Machine-language instructions are the fastest unit of execution on a computer. While the slowness of opnode dispatch (each requires several dozen or even hundreds of machine-language instructions) is one of the motivations for some of the design changes in Perl 6.

- tye        

In reply to Re^3: Why is this code so much slower than the same algorithm in C? (ops) by tye
in thread Why is this code so much slower than the same algorithm in C? by wanna_code_perl

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