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Perl 5.14 released

news.perlfoundation.org

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Re: Perl 5.14 released

#11

Post by themonk »

jrockway wrote: post #4
veyron wrote: post #3

What is happening with perl 6? And will perl developers actively work on perl 5 after .14?

Perl 6 is a completely different programming language and is generally unrelated to Perl 5 except in name, history, and a common group of comitters and users. Perl 5 releases a new major version every year, and a new development version every month. So 5.16 will be around next spring, and 5.18 will be around the spring after that. With thousands of users around the world, Perl 5 is not going away any time soon.

I love Perl, long live Perl 5, thanks to decimal system, we can have 5.99999... ;)

Re: Perl 5.14 released

#12

Post by chuhnk »

I would love to see benchmarks against ruby 1.9.2. Perl always had comparable speed to ruby 1.8.6 with lower memory consumption and cpu usage. Now hopefully it'll be equivalent to ruby 1.9.2.

Re: Perl 5.14 released

#13

Post by perlgeek »

veyron wrote: post #3

What is happening with perl 6? And will perl developers actively work on perl 5 after .14?

As jrockway said, Perl 5 and Perl 6 development is mostly decoupled. I write some code for Perl 6 compilers, and now and then contribute a (most often doc) patch to Perl 5.

Both move along nicely, and Perl 5 gets many inspirations from Perl 6 - not the least of it is a time-based release schedule, which is why you see many more releases of Perl 5 in the last two years.

Re: Perl 5.14 released

#14

Post by old-gregg »

chuhnk wrote: post #12

I would love to see benchmarks against ruby 1.9.2. Perl always had comparable speed to ruby 1.8.6 with lower memory consumption and cpu usage. Now hopefully it'll be equivalent to ruby 1.9.2.

Not following you here, how can speed of one language be the same as another's, but "with lower cpu usage"?

Re: Perl 5.14 released

#15

Post by draegtun »

chuhnk wrote: post #12

I would love to see benchmarks against ruby 1.9.2. Perl always had comparable speed to ruby 1.8.6 with lower memory consumption and cpu usage. Now hopefully it'll be equivalent to ruby 1.9.2.

If you check (historically) the benchmarks on http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ then:

* perl5 was always a 2-4 times faster than than ruby 1.8

* perl5 & ruby 1.9 are comparable usually swapping places on different "Which programming languages are fastest?" benchmarks

* When taking in above speed benchmarks, memory used & code-used then perl5 just nudges in front of ruby 1.9. See "Which programming language is best?"

Re: Perl 5.14 released

#16

Post by jrockway »

themonk wrote: post #11
jrockway wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl 6 is a completely different programming language and is generally unrelated to Perl 5 except in name, history, and a common group of comitters and users. Perl 5 releases a new major version every year, and a new development version every month. So 5.16 will be around next spring, and 5.18 will be around the spring after that. With thousands of users around the world, Perl 5 is not going away any time soon.

I love Perl, long live Perl 5, thanks to decimal system, we can have 5.99999... ;)

Though with an infinite number of nines, it becomes Perl 6.

Re: Perl 5.14 released

#17

Post by ojosilva »

chuhnk wrote: post #12

I would love to see benchmarks against ruby 1.9.2. Perl always had comparable speed to ruby 1.8.6 with lower memory consumption and cpu usage. Now hopefully it'll be equivalent to ruby 1.9.2.

Here are some quick, unsophisticated benchmarks of a "Hello World" test web server. I ran it in our dev server (Centos 5.3 i386). Ran with ab -t 30 a few times and chose the fastest of the batch.

Perl 5.14, Dancer 1.3040, HTTP::Server::PSGI:

   Requests per second:    856.48 [#/sec] (mean)
   Memory after tests: 11296 (VSZ) 7632 (RSS)
Ruby 1.9.2, Sinatra 1.2.6, WEBRick 1.3.1:

   Requests per second:    402.72 [#/sec] (mean)
   Memory after tests: 20612 (VSZ) 10628 (RSS)
I know. This is not, by any means, serious language benchmarks (ie. Sinatra, WEBRick, Dancer are interfering), but they give me a rough idea of how things can perform side-by-side for a given setup.

I'm also a fan of running quick string management tests to roughly benchmark interpreters at a given servers, since most of our codebase do a lot of string manip. Here's a 1MB mem alloc + cat test:

Ruby 1.9.2:

  $ time ruby -e 'x=""; (1..999999).each { x
Perl 5.14:

   $ time perl -E '$x.="a" for 1..999999'
   real	0m0.167s
   user	0m0.139s
   sys	0m0.020s
As I said, this is completely unscientific. There are much better ways of benchmarking languages out there.

Re: Perl 5.14 released

#18

Post by chuhnk »

old-gregg wrote: post #14
chuhnk wrote: post #12

I would love to see benchmarks against ruby 1.9.2. Perl always had comparable speed to ruby 1.8.6 with lower memory consumption and cpu usage. Now hopefully it'll be equivalent to ruby 1.9.2.

Not following you here, how can speed of one language be the same as another's, but "with lower cpu usage"?

Sorry I threw that into the same sentence when it made no sense to do so.

Re: Perl 5.14 released

#19

Post by perokreco »

old-gregg wrote: post #14
chuhnk wrote: post #12

I would love to see benchmarks against ruby 1.9.2. Perl always had comparable speed to ruby 1.8.6 with lower memory consumption and cpu usage. Now hopefully it'll be equivalent to ruby 1.9.2.

Not following you here, how can speed of one language be the same as another's, but "with lower cpu usage"?

CPU does not necessarily have to be the bottleneck.

Re: Perl 5.14 released

#20

Post by perlgeek »

ojosilva wrote: post #9
adulau wrote: post #8

There are many important updates regarding memory use. That's an interesting improvement especially when you have long lasting Perl script in distributed environment. Especially that we can gain some memory on some data structure, it's always an interesting gain.

We have been testing perl 5.14 RC2 version in one of our dev box during last week, and the performance improvements are just monstrous! Got a 20-30% faster app straight out of the box, and some hefty memory savings. It's really noticeable on smaller scripts. Can't wait to put 5.14 in production!

20% to 30% has typically been the difference between threaded and non-threaded perl interpreters.

Have you checked if both your old and the new perl have the same threading settings?

I expected some performance improvements from the upgrade, but I found 20% to be pretty surprising -- still I won't complain :-)

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