-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 12:58:51PM -0800, Jeff Yoak wrote: > This is something different. The investor is in a related business, and > has developed substantially similar software for years. And it is really > good. What's worse is that my normal, biggest argument isn't compelling in > this case, that by the time this would be done in C, I'd be doing contract > work on Mars. The investor claims to have evaluated Perl vs. C years ago, > to have witnessed that every single hit on the webserver under mod_perl > causes a CPU usage spike that isn't seen with C, and that under heavy load > mod_perl completely falls apart where C doesn't. (This code is, of course, > LONG gone so I can't evaluate it for whether the C was good and the Perl > was screwy.) At any rate, because of this, he's spent years having good > stuff written in C. Unbeknownst to either me or my client, both this > software and its developer were available to us, so in this case it would > have been faster, cheaper and honestly even better, by which I mean more > fully-featured.
Ah, the good old "my timeless knowledge from the Nixon administration still applies" argument. Remember that the speed of both languages has increased geometrically as a function of hardware speed. 5 years ago you may have been talking a difference of a second or two between Perl and C. Nowadays you'll be measuring the differences in milliseconds, if that much. And you're right, one still can't verify the veracity of the ancient benchmarked code. On another list someone was dealing with Perl and DBI against PHP for a database-driven site, with nothing to go on but some ApacheBench numbers showing the PHP page about six orders of magnitude faster. Then one "minor" difference of note: the Perl program had output about 70MB of data; the PHP program, about 940 bytes. I assume that the PHP program was doing a null loop or something where the query should have been. Get him to do a real unbiased comparison on modern hardware, and then defy him to claim that the milliseconds he saves are worth the effort. - -- Stephen Clouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Senior Programmer, IQ Coordinator Project Lead The IQ Group, Inc. <http://www.theiqgroup.com/> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 6.5.8 iQA/AwUBPBpsFQOGqGs0PadnEQJ9TgCgtZnIhFLq/L/DeZA5CS4yAjzBRiEAn3ED lTRl2/yaG9eH7BK785GKajp3 =jLX5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
