Re^4: Perl vs C

[assemble]

I can suggest several algorithms and data structures and tasks which will be as fast in Perl as in C.

I keep seeing people say this, but I've never managed to see it happen. Usually Perl is fast enough, but I've never managed to outperform the equivalent C program. Could you please provide some examples of what is faster in Perl than C, because I really am interested.

[chromatic]

Many of these algorithms are for arbitrary string searching; it's difficult to outperform Perl's regex engine. (Please note that the portion of my post which you did not quite implied that you can't pull in PCRE.) I suspect, but can't immediately prove, that code heavy with malloc/free temporary data may reach a point where it's faster in Perl than in C, but that depends on overcoming the overhead of op dispatch in Perl.

[assemble]

Thanks.

Most of my work is binary data crunching, and that's not exactly Perl's strongest suit. Perhaps if I was doing a large amount of work with text processing I would have noticed the performance increase.