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0 pointsthrowaway3734385y ago0 comments

No, his estimates look pretty accurate to me. I've also done a fair bit of both Perl and Python (including working with the internals in C).

Perl is significantly faster than Python for many types of common string manipulation tasks. They're both fast, sure, but Perl has some key optimizations.

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7thaccount5y ago

For maybe some regex tasks sure, but there are also plenty of Python operations that are significantly faster than Perl, not to even mention all the data science stuff. I might have misunderstood the comment as evaluating the language on one thing doesn't capture a broad/general spectrum of usefulness.

throwaway373438OP5y ago

Every language in this category will have bindings to domain specific high performance modules. This is part of why performance doesn't matter all that much - we can always push hot operations into another language.

Perl generally outperforms python in core language features.

7thaccount5y ago

The benchmarks shown elsewhere here tend to disagree with that. I think at one point that was more true than it is now. Overall though they seem to be comparable enough to where it probably doesn't matter.

Also, the bindings have to exist which they don't with Perl for a lot of scientific uses (PDL is not a substitute for Numpy/SciPy/Pandas).

Don't get me wrong. I own at least 12 Perl books and have reviewed some of the latest Perl 6 (Raku) books and really really like Raku. There's not much wrong with Perl in my book (certainly not what most people claim). I've reached for it a few times at work and found it to be fairly pleasant to use. My biggest complaints about building complex data structures in Perl (yes it's much easier than C, but still complicated if you're coming from Python) and having to remember when something is "$" that in my mind should be "@" have all been fixed by Raku.

I just wanted to point out that your views about it being much faster across the board don't seem to be correct.

hpcjoe5y ago

Any data to back up this claim? My experience in dealing with large numbers of files, huge data sets, is that Perl generally roars, while python lags. I converted a python code to Perl associated with some recent work, and got a good ~2.5x overall improvement. It varied a bit as a function of the input, but generally Perl is superior in performance. Some areas Python is better, but not many.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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7thaccount5y ago

throwaway373438OP5y ago

Perl generally outperforms python in core language features.

7thaccount5y ago

Also, the bindings have to exist which they don't with Perl for a lot of scientific uses (PDL is not a substitute for Numpy/SciPy/Pandas).

I just wanted to point out that your views about it being much faster across the board don't seem to be correct.

hpcjoe5y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse