Re: Fastest data structure compare?

[eserte]

Using Storable is problematic, because it's not guaranteed that semantically equivalent data is serialized in the same way. Here's an example playing with the internal utf-8 flag --- while Test::More's is_deeply and Data::Compare get it right, checking the serialized Storable data fails:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Data::Compare qw();
use Storable qw(nfreeze);
use Test::More qw(no_plan);

my $data1 = ["f\xfcbar"];
my $data2 = [substr("f\xfcbar\x{0100}", 0, -1)];

is_deeply($data1, $data2, "is_deeply test");
ok(Data::Compare::Compare($data1, $data2), "Data::Compare");
ok(nfreeze($data1) eq nfreeze($data2), "storable serialized");

I just benchmarked Test::More::is_deeply vs. Data::Compare and found that the latter is 3x faster for a data set which size is ~6MB as a storable-serialized file. This probably depends on the structure of the data set.