[mplspm]: Is 5.6 faster than 5.005?

[Dave Rolsky]

On Thu, 14 Feb 2002, Chris Siegler wrote:

> I have some code that parses html (using HTML::TreeBuilder) that I run
> off my shell account. It's very cpu intensive stuff. Would Perl 5.6 run
> this code faster than 5.005? I was trying to get the sysadmin to upgrade
> Perl (they have a build from 1999 running), but he doesn't agree that a
> newer binary would help run time. I really don't know much about Perl's
> compilation phase, so don't have much to go on, but I think 5.6 would be
> faster. Is there any page out there benchmarking versions of Perl
> (towers of hanoi, etc.)?

It is highly unlikely to the best of my knowledge.  From what I've seen
following discussions on the Perl5-porters list, Perl 5 has basically
gotten a bit slower with each major release.  For example, Perl 5.6.0
added a lot of Unicode stuff that slows down certain string operations.

OTOH, certain individual things have sometimes been sped up a lot.

There is a perlbench test that I see referred to on p5p.

Basically, there's no reason to upgrade to 5.6.1 unless there are language
features you need (or modules that use those language features).


-dave

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