Re: Speed comparison

[Bennett Todd <bet@...>]

1999-06-03-15:44:38 Supratik Champati:
> I have personally tested lua, perl, python, tcl by writing similar scripts.
> I found lua to be much faster [...]

I'd expect that would depend strongly on what exactly you are doing. Many
things will be faster in perl, since many things can be done easily in perl
where the bulk of the actual work is being done by builtins (or by
dynamically-loaded extensions, written in C, that you've pulled down from
CPAN). As soon as you are doing substantial processing in the top-level
scripting language things slow down, and would expect they'd slow down less
for Lua than for most other languages.

> But the thing that really made me embrace lua is the sheer elegance
> of the language.
> Although relatively new, it is a very stable code.
> The source code is still < 10k lines (compare with 60k+ lines for
> perl/python).
> I do not think going with lua can be a bad choice any which way one
> looks at it.

I'd say it would depend on what you're doing.

For places where small is important, Lua is beautiful. For other jobs, where
size doesn't matter:-), I strongly prefer perl; it's so richly expressive,
there are so many high-level extensions available from CPAN, I can do so many
interesting chores with a minimum of code.

But I wouldn't want to e.g. fire up a perl for every local delivery of an
email message, whereas doing that with a Lua seems practical to me.

-Bennett