A Curious Benchmark
Hi hackers! I recently saw a curious benchmark passed round on the #moarvm channel. (I understand that this originates from Ovid during his Future of Perl 5 and 6 presentation, but I haven't seen it myself, so if I'm wrong, don't hesitate to correct me). It's curious because it runs on perl5 and perl6, and because the difference is… significant: # reciprocal.pl my $x = 0; $x += 1/$_ for 1..50_000_000; print "$x\n" ; Perl 5 (5.24.1), on my laptop (Intel i7-4700HQ CPU @ 2.40GHz, 16GB ram), takes approximately 2.7s to print the value 18.3047492382933 . Perl 6, on the same script, takes just shy of 2m18s , or nearly 140s. This is 51 times as much. Perl 5 is not known as a particularly fast language, but in this case perl 6 is really very slow indeed. Let's try and do a little better. As pointed out by timotimo , the benchmark above is a pessimal case for rationals numbers, which perl 6 uses by default. Perl 5 uses floating point throughout. So