Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 13:59:07 +0100 From: Philippe Regnauld <none@regnauld--deepo.prosa.dk.lh.bsd-dk.dk> To: bsd-dk@hotel.prosa.dk Subject: Re: FreeBSD og danske tegn
Lasse Hillerøe Petersen writes:
> > So you can use 25 MB of RAM, and 100% CPU for 1 minute to read
> > a 3000 mail mailbox ?
>
> Now that's what I call an opinion. Different, I must say. Valid? I am not
> so sure. A strong opinion - certainly. You have some hangup with Perl or
> something?
I write exclusively in Perl. I wrote firewall log analysis
tools in Perl/Tk. EU.org, which I co administrate, runs the
entire administration (front end + back end) in Perl. I love
Perl, but to each tool its use.
Perl's instantiation time is long enough that Apache has a
module to keep it running in memory to avoid the overhead
of fork+exec+parse. Perl is great for large scripting,
automated tasks and prototyping, and some smaller application
development.
It's perfectly reasonable to write an application like a
mailreader in Perl -- after all, there are X Window mail
readers written in tcl/tk :-)
But don't expect great performance or low memory footprint :-)
I grant that Perl is not perfect, but nothing is. I am impressed
> by the way you can apparantly grab numbers out of the air. Would you mind
> backing them up with some research data, or at least anecdotal evidence?
Read the above.
Perl's optimization is targeted to "launch one, run long", with
_extremely_ good optimization around regular expression
(parsing, concatenation, and reduction). The syntax is extendable,
the execution does runtime garbage collection -- all these things
come at a price: longer first-run launch (OS caching helps a lot
afterwards), and bigger memory footprint.
Like I said, I like Perl, but I certainly don't grab numbers
out of the air -- as for opinions, I wasn't the one
to say that "all mail readers suck, I'll write my own in Perl".
Cheers.
--
-[ Philippe Regnauld / Sysadmin ]-
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Wed 15 Nov 2006 - 18:24:00 CET