> On 29 Apr 2016, at 19:03 , Swift Griggs <swiftgri...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Fri, 29 Apr 2016, Raymond Wiker wrote: >> The regular expression support in Perl is implemented in C, and are >> supposedly fairly fast. > > They are faster than some, like Ruby and slower than others like > (apparently) LISP.
It's not *generally* the case that cl-ppcre is faster than PCRE - it depends completely on the (Common) Lisp implementation that it is running in. > >> That didn't stop a Lisp programmer from implementing PCREs in Lisp (that >> supposedly slow and inefficient language), > > Cool. Which LISP ? CL ? The original benchmark was run using CMUCL, which is generally considered to be a high-quality, fast implementation of Common Lisp. The benchmarks are not part of the cl-ppcre homepage anymore, but an old version can be found at the Wayback Machine <http://web.archive.org/web/20080624164217/http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/#bench>. >> and getting better performance than Perl :-) > > Hehe, well, right on then. > > My opinion is that benchmarking and subsequent proclamations using > scripting languages is like racing snails vs slime molds (my money is on > the snails, BTW). It's all fun until someone shows you a graph of the same > algorithm in C and puts a quarter-horse in the race. Then your saying to > yourself things like "Should I be 10x or 15x slower?" :-P > > http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programs-are-fastest.html > > -Swift >