Language choice [was Re: Symlinks]

[Paul Robinson]

On Feb 12, Dominic Mitchell <dom at happygiraffe.net> wrote:

> Just to offer a counter-opinion before leaving this thread, there's
> nothing wrong with using Perl.  Like all languages, you write your code,
> run your profiler and optimize the hot spots.  For a scripting language
> like Perl or Python, that includes moving speed-sensitive routines to C
> (or even assembly).  There's nothing intrinsically wrong with scripting
> languages.

High-load daemons need to be able to listen on a port, fork() or thread 
(through whatever mechanism you want) quickly, do what needs to be done as 
quickly as possible and then get the data out, with the thread/fork dying 
ASAP. In other words, you want everything from start to finish to be as fast 
as possible. The only thing you might conceed some time to is bootstrapping 
up and reading the config file, for which Perl would be most suitable. 
Unless of course you are -HUP'ing it in a regular basis. :-)
 
> To bring the point firmly around, look at how many people are running
> apache/mod_perl in high load situations out there.

Depends on what you mean by 'high-load' - if you're writing a scalable DNS 
server, assume it will end up on a.root-servers.net one day. Then tell me 
that it should be written in Perl. :-)

-- 
Paul Robinson