developerWorks: Optimize Perl

“I’ll be honest: I love Perl and I use it everywhere. I’ve
written Web sites, administration scripts, and games using Perl. I
frequently save time by getting Perl to do and check things
automatically for me, everything from my lottery numbers to the
stock markets, and I even use it to automatically file my e-mail.
Because Perl makes it so easy to do all of these things, there’s a
tendency to forget about optimization. In many cases this isn’t the
end of the world. So what if it takes an extra few milliseconds to
look up your stock reports or parse those log files?

“However, those same lazy habits that cost milliseconds in a
small application are multiplied when dealing with larger scale
development projects. It’s the one area where the Perl mantra of
TMTOWTDI (There’s More Than One Way To Do It) starts to look like a
bad plan…”

Complete Story