Sometimes one needs an extra ounce of performance. Why not combine the high level semantics of Perl with the punch of assembly?

This repo includes various examples of how this can be done.

Chapter 3 of Higher Order Perl describes various approaches to memoization of an expensive function: private cache and the Memoize module. The book was written in 2005 (Perl was at version 5.8 back then) , so it does not include another way for function caching that is now available : caching through state variables (introduced in Perl 5.10). The Fibonacci example considered in HOP also requires the ability to initialize state hash variables (available since Perl 5.28). The code below contrasts the implementation with a state…

Brett Estrade, did it again with yet another excellent talk at TPRC 2024 about the use of OpenMP for parallelizing Perl/C code. This is an area that is extremely interesting as OpenMP is a rather straightforward way to parallelize code using simple compiler pragmas in Inline::C sections of code. Furthermore, as I discussed at TPRC2024, the combination of the Many Core Engine (/users/chrisarg/perl/index.html

I am sick and tired of hearing this, so let's put it this to the test. Assume you know little of Perl, or any programming language for that matter. Can you parse the code?

https://chrisarg.github.io/Killing-It-with-PERL/2023/12/06/Is-Perl-a-write-only-language.html

I hope the piece above is the first in a series to convince people to consider the reality before passing judgement. It was inspired by one of our research analysts discovering Perl and awk to simplify their l…

In the second part of this series about fast parsers for sequencing applications,  I will review the code for the regex based parser. This is shown below (I use v5.38, as you should! because the year is 2023 and you should not have to type use strict; use warnings)