New perl features?

[Alex Balhatchet]

On 15 March 2013 13:07, Mark Fowler <mark at twoshortplanks.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Alex Balhatchet <kaoru at slackwise.net> wrote:
>
>> I don't think any major release has made perl *slower*,
>
> Is this now true?  I remember ten years ago Nick said in his
> YAPC::Europe::2002 talk  that newer versions of Perl were sometimes
> slower.  That *was* ten years ago, so I'm more than happy to get an
> updated

I'm not sure whether it is true, but the perldelta documents always
contain interesting and important-sounding performance improvements -
@_ using less memory, shift with no parameters being faster, in-place
sorting (including "reverse sort ..."), string appending getting much
faster. Given that these are the sorts of things that your average
large perl system will do a billion times a day it seems good to me
that they're always getting faster :-)

Anecdotally at $work we've used perl 5.8.8, perl 5.10.1, perl 5.12.3,
and perl 5.14.2 and I've not seen any drastic performance hit from any
of the upgrades.

> There's People Who Should Know on this list.  What say you?

Question seconded, anybody have actual figures to back up my wild theories?

- Alex