14 Jan
1999
14 Jan
'99
4:24 p.m.
On Fri, 15 Jan 1999, Roger Merchberger wrote:
Mind you, it's not a whopping lot faster, but how
it can be faster (by a
few to five percent) is this: Larry Wall (who wrote Perl) optimized it in
such a way that any ol' schmuck (like me) says "I could do this in C!!!"
and does so, but not as efficiently as Larry did... therefore, code in Perl
is faster than the reworked version in C.
This isn't always true. When I wrote a de-artifacter for images captured
from a video source, I wrote it first in PERL to prove
to myself the
algorithm I conceived would work; I used PERL because I am more
familiar
with it than any other language.
Later, I ported the program to C which netted me a dramatic performance
increase: 15 minute processing times dropped to around a minute, while
CPU usage during the processing dropped from 100% to about 30%.
This isn't to disparage PERL at all. I like PERL. There are some things
other languages are better suited for, though.
This is mildly on topic because I use the program to clean up the archive
images I create of items in my collection. (I wrote it in the first place
because I didn't want to have to pay to have fifty plus rolls of film
developed when I could use a video camera to make the pictures for free.)
--
ok
r. r e d @ b e a r s . o r g
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