My guess is that any dereferencing overhead is invisible
next to the overhead of constructing scalars and then
stringifying them.
As for the performance issue, the general programming
principle is that
premature
optimization is the root of all evil. Furthermore if
performance really is critical, then Perl is the
wrong language to use. Perl will speed development, has
very large reusable libraries, improves reliability by
doing memory management for you, etc, etc, etc. But while
it is fast for a scripting language, far faster ones
exist out there.
