In the vast majority of cases, barring painstaking optimization, you will probably find that selecting an appropriate algorithm will have a much larger effect on program run time than the language the program is written.

Not particularly tuned; tested on a 6 year old computer:

use warnings;
use strict;
use Time::HiRes qw/ tv_interval gettimeofday/;

my $time0 = [gettimeofday];

use warnings;
use strict;

my $max = 100;

my @primes = ( 2, 3 );  #seed the primes

my $this = $primes[-1];
while ( $max > scalar @primes ) {
    $this += 2;
    my $sqrt = $this**.5;
    for (@primes) {
        if ( $_ > $sqrt ) {
            push @primes, $this;
            last;
        }
        next if $this % $_;
        last;
    }
}

my $elapsed = tv_interval( $time0, [gettimeofday] );
print "Printing the first $max numbers that are prime... \n";
print "$_ is prime.\n" for @primes;
print "Took $elapsed seconds.";

[download]
Printing the first 100 numbers that are prime...
2 is prime.
3 is prime.
5 is prime.
...
...
521 is prime.
523 is prime.
541 is prime.
Took 0.00096 seconds.

In reply to Re: performance of perl vs java by thundergnat
in thread performance of perl vs java by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.