

Ask HN: How did Perl avoid the "Slow" label? - stcredzero

How is it that a scripting language like Perl avoided the "Slow" label when other languages with faster implementations couldn't?  What did Perl do right or wrong with PR to accomplish this?
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gdl
It all depends what you're comparing it against, and how you're using it. Keep
in mind that Perl was originally created to fit a text processing and shell
scripting niche, in which it is tuned to perform quite nicely. I've heard it
claimed that its regex engine is likely the fastest you'll find anywhere.

These days its reputation is mainly in the above, and as a glue language. It's
simply not used as much for large standalone applications where people would
really notice the speed issue, in comparison to something like Java (which is
what comes to mind for me as at least at one time having the "slow"
reputation).

And although it might not apply in the distant past, CPAN is large enough now
that for any conceivable resource-intensive task, there will be a modules
available to wrap an appropriate C library.

------
_delirium
Perl was pitched initially as a replacement for shell-scripting + sed + awk;
if you take that as a baseline, Perl is usually much faster. Many of the other
"slow" languages seem to pitch themselves as competitors in wider spaces.

The text-processing focus, especially early on, might also be a factor,
because if you're mainly banging data through regexes, it's pretty fast. The
super-fancy regexes-that-are-more-than-regular do have degenerate cases, but
they're fast in a wide range of cases, and in my comparisons usually beat sed.

------
billturner
My guess is that Perl has been silently chugging along in the background,
while Ruby (with Rails) and Python (with Django) popped into the spotlight
under higher scrutiny.

Perl hasn't had a popular framework that has built as large a community of
users (and detractors) as any other. They do have frameworks (like Catalyst),
but nothing that has gathered as much attention.

