I'm working in Windows (employer's choice) and need to process some huge data files on the desktop.

Perl (Strawberry Perl for Windows) is much faster than native Powershell (or CMD) scripts. A few Perl one-liners and I have 2 GB processed in a couple of minutes.

Big fan of Perl here.

> A few Perl one-liners and I have 2 GB processed in a couple of minutes.

This matches my experience: my task is IO bound, processing tens of GB in a matter of minutes.

> I'm working in Windows (employer's choice)

Work prefers MacOS, Windows is my personal choice :)

Windows 10 and 11 are a pleasure to use: between the Windows Terminal and tools like AutoHotKey, there's no Linux equivalent, even for a commandline geek.

Using Windows (and Perl, and other weird things I like) may not be fashionable, but it's hard to beat.

Full disclosure: Work has been Windows centric, but I recently moved to a new group with some Mac users. I'll have that choice, next time I swap hardware, but probably will stay with Windows because

* Would miss too many amazingly useful utilities like arsclip.

* Easier to patch into my home network, which is NTFS-based.

* Employer is now wedded to Microsoft and Azure, so having Powershell and native access to NTFS AD on my native desktop is proving more useful.

* I actually like the Windows interface, even with the Control Panel and other system utilities caught in a weird split between Windows XP and WIndows 10 UIs.

* Some things, like certificate management and hosting a personal database, I do in Ubuntu or Debian as a VirtualBox guest under Windows.

* Wife uses Windows on her laptop. She doesn't know it, but it's actually running as a VM on Debian, very stable, and can easily take her Windows to a new machine.

* [I keep coming back to add items to this list] Remote Desktop Services have improved vastly, and I can manage remote servers or 12 year old client machines at a remote site with equal ease. (XP/7-era machines got a second life when I converted Windows OS disk to SSD). Also find screen sharing via 3rd party VNC (TightVNC) useful.

* The keystrokes have become second-nature. Try as I might, I can never get fully comfortable on a Mac OS desktop. Now get off my lawn.

> The keystrokes have become second-nature. Try as I might, I can never get fully comfortable on a Mac OS desktop.

Same, that's one of the biggest reasons - but I also agree with the rest of your list: what I like the most in Windows is the UI! I run most of my programs fullscreen, with shortcuts. I rarely use the mouse, and Windows plays along, while I have to fight other systems.

Even when run baremetal, Windows has improved so much over the board that once you add RDP/VNC, it's a no brainer.

> > A few Perl one-liners and I have 2 GB processed in a couple of minutes. > This matches my experience: my task is IO bound, processing tens of GB in a matter of minutes.

Huh. Windows is usually anywhere between bad to horrible at IO compared to alternatives. 2GB processing (usually mixtures of regex, summarizing data, summing fields extracted) shouldn't take more than a few seconds. Even on a slow disk, say 100MB/s, we are talking 20s. On faster SSDs, and NVMe, its very snappy.

If you are waiting minutes ...

> Windows 10 and 11 are a pleasure to use: between the Windows Terminal and tools like AutoHotKey, there's no Linux equivalent, even for a commandline geek.

Huh. I'm happy that $dayjob gave me the option of getting off my horrible Dell workstation laptop (8 core, 64 GB ram, nvidia graphics) and onto a mac pro m1. While the keyboard diff is annoying, karabiner elements fixes most of that. I still ask for a linux laptop at ever opportunity though, as this is what I'm most functional with. Easily the best/fastest experience I've had for dev/admin, and the most stable. Mac is a close second.

Perl is the Unix utilities' replacement for Windows. It can do awk/sed in one place.

What I miss it's a "strings(1)" replacement for Perl.

There's a "strings" implementation in the PerlPowerTools : https://metacpan.org/pod/PerlPowerTools

TIL. Good addon for w32 perl users.

I don't think you could be slower than Powershell if you tried.

When you refer to modern hardware with vectorization, are you saying perl beats software that makes use of vector instructions? If so wow! Afaik perl is a plain old interpreted language with no JIT, what makes it so fast? I had an idea of perl as in the same performance category as Python, Ruby and friends.

My assumption (and I could be wrong) is that whenever you do something that's ultimately CPU intense, perl dives into C code. The sort of stuff you do with perl tends to be a lot of string manipulation and it turns out perl is pretty hyper optimized for that sort of workload.

Other languages could do the same, but often they have a few more layers before they start running that C code.

I'd be curious to know if the perl grammar also somehow lends itself to being fairly optimizable for it's interpreter.

Perl does a kind of half JIT when you start a script. It doesn't compile fully down to native machine code, but it does parse and lex the script to build an internal representation. The code is then interpreted, but since it doesn't have to parse each line again it runs very fast and also you can interpret code on the fly in a variable so you get the best of both worlds.

This has been the usual way to implement interpreted languages for decades; Perl isn't special in that regard. JIT generally refers to generation and execution of native code specifically.

I'm pretty sure bash still interprets line by line because you can mess up a script by editing it while it is executing.

bash (and other shells) are special in that regard, because they use textual substitution so heavily - to pass arguments etc.

But Python, Ruby etc all compile to bytecode, and have always done so as far as I can remember.

> Afaik perl is a plain old interpreted language with no JIT, what makes it so fast?

IDK. I didn't waste time checking why.

My guess is that due to the much smaller code size, it reaches a sweetpoint where it fits nicely in the L1 or L2 cache.

But it's just a hunch, I couldn't prove it.

Perl likely spends a lot more time in C than a lot of other bytecode-compiled languages like Python.

  while(<STDIN>) {
   print $_;
  }

isn't doing much of its work at the top level.

What's the difference when compared with other scripting languages? Is it just all-around faster or it's about some particular application?

> What's the difference when compared with other scripting languages?

Compared to every other scripted languages I've tried, it's always faster - so much that it often rivals compiled code (even with extra optimizations as explained before)

> Is it just all-around faster

Yes - also faster to deploy, and harder to break in deployment due to dependencies rarely evolving. No need to pip install whatever.

Consequently, tracking modules' versions (say in python) and their break in compatibility is a thing of the past. Some may say it's because it's dead. I guess I'm a necrophiliac then, because it makes my life so much easier that I'm loving it :)

1. What's your top technique for keeping it fast?

2. Are you hiring?

> 1. What's your top technique for keeping it fast?

Using the stock install as much as possible.

Since a perl interpreter is available about everywhere, this makes the scripts cross platform very easily too.

> 2. Are you hiring?

Maybe? You have no email in your profile. Can you please send your CV to my nickname at outlook dot com?

Any chance to make it open source on GitHub?