On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
> If
> you have a system structured appropriately for perl where the seriously
> expensive compilation stage is only executed once then perl is a real
> win.
Perl seems to be an acceptable loss for some, but adds absolutely no
value for me. I can't see how it can possibly be considered a "win".
> Also by knocking down the security
> settings - just running seteuid - then you make exim processes not need
> to exec to regain privilege at the cost of less inherent security.
"do the job properly"
versus
"do the job quickly and create a dependency on an ugly
high-maintenance package which is not always present"
Hmm. That's a tough one ;)
> I am slightly stunned by this.
I am slightly stunned by the increasingly frequent use of Perl in
applications where it is entirely unsuitable. I am also apalled at the
use of Perl scripts to perform extremely simple tasks during the build of
packages including INN and Squid - the final product gains nothing from
the availability of Perl, and those simple build tasks could just as
easily have been fulfilled using tools like sed and awk.
> In general I have found the difference
> between doing serious work in perl and C to be within an order of
> magnitude (assuming competent coding)
In other words, serious work shouldn't be done in Perl...
> and sometimes perl can be faster
> because the people who wrote its library are very smart cookies.
... but if you can't be bothered learning to program efficiently and you
don't give a damn about keeping a system clean and free of unnecessary
dependencies/complexities, use Perl.
> Benchmarks can usually be made to prove whatever you wish, and perl is
> certainly much faster to write a given function within unless you have
> a very well provisioned C toolkit.
Again, "easy and messy" versus "investing some time in efficiency".
I think Exim and MySQL are both excellent packages, and I'm very pleased
to hear that I'll be able to put them to work together without a
dependency on Perl (which is totally unrelated and unnecessary to the
function of either package).
