Why Perl needs a VM

[Toby Corkindale]

ben at bpfh.net wrote:
> I've got to thinking recently about the issue of whether 
> Perl (and dynamic languages in general) need VMs.
> 
> I'd been increasingly coming to the conclusion that they do, and
> then someone in my team performed a piece of performance analysis
> which really made me think.
> 
> Our application is a large (currently all-Perl) mail sending pipeline.
> 
> Having profiled it, we know that in the critical sending section, the
> application is spending most of its time either doing regex or scanning
> XML using XPaths.
> 
> The former task has Perl showing a minor, but significant performance 
> advantage over Java, presumably because so much of the real work is taking
> place in optimised C code, down below the runops dispatch.
> 
> The latter task is performed in pure Perl, and here Java out-performs by
> a large factor (I've heard 20-100x, but I need to dig into those numbers
> more - I don't think I want to take them on face value).

You mention below that you are thinking of re-writing parts of the app
in Java, because of the slow Pure-Perl performance.. can you instead
just swap to using a Perl module that evaluates the XPaths via a C
implementation, thus gaining the speed advantage over Java again, as
with the regexes?
(I think XML::LibXML::XPathContext is an example of such?)

Apologies for side-stepping the main subject.

-Toby

> 
> I think I'm coming round to the point of view which says that VMs should
> be the natural target for dynamic languages because you can then separate
> the VM-level optimisation and JITing from the higher-level improvements.
> 
> The VM should offer the right sort of hooks to aid dynamic language 
> implementors and should be cleanly and publicly specified, so as not to
> provide a fast-moving target for anyone trying to target it.
> 
> (In terms of our application, I think the writing's on the wall. No-one
> wants to start rewriting code for the hell of it, but without something to
> boost the XPath performance, at least some of the modules in the pipeline 
> will end up being rewritten as Java, because we will need the performance
> boost to give us some headroom in the application.)
> 
> So, having thrown the hat down, what do you lot reckon?
> 
> Ben
>