Date: Sun, 26 May 1996 10:40:25 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Cc: dima@freebsd.org (Dima Ruban) Subject: Re: Adduser program in C Message-ID: <199605260840.KAA01190@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199605252305.QAA19014@freefall.freebsd.org> from Dima Ruban at "May 25, 96 04:04:59 pm"
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As Dima Ruban wrote: > > Perl is certainly one of the fastest scripting languages. > > fastest scripting language != fastest programming language. Right. But for many of us, the time to write and maintain a program does also count, and that's where scripting languages win. > I don't think perl script is going to be faster when the same C program. That depends. You can write poor programs with every language. If the Perl program is large (so the compilation time doesn't matter too much), you can easily have well-written Perl and C programs that run at roughly the same speed. If you pick something like Perl to write things with it that have to be written with awk/sed/sh/sort pipelines, the classic solution is often slower. (Again: i don't speak about _rewriting_ an existing application, only about the decision of tools when writing something new.) > About scripting language ... One of my clients had chat script for his > WWW server written on perl. Standard load average on this machine was > 40-70!!!!! > And now it keeps under 10 only becasue I wrote this script on C. But only since your C program is well-written, and the Perl program not. I think i could also write you a C program that would even higher the load of the system. :) Anyway, as somebody else also replied: nobody claims that there is The One True Programming Language. The argumentation that was starting all this was: ``I will rewrite it in C, since i'm too lazy to get the Perl one.'' > Maybe some day, when computer will have lotsa memory and at least 10 times > faster CPUs, maybe then perl will become standard or something. I beg to disagree. Unless your entire equipment is 386/16's or such, you've already got enough computing power to base your decision of tools on ease of use and elegance, instead on resource tightness. Look at all the nice Tcl/Tk applications. They usually aren't slower than say the average Winloose application -- and they are entirely interpreted! But they wouldn't even be there if there was not Tcl: nobody would have had the time to write them. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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