Re: [Boost-users] boost.regex vs perl

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-11-22 12:28:15

John Maddock wrote:
> Jeff Garland wrote:

>> That said, it's one data point and what you're doing may have totally
>> different results.  That's not to mention the effect of the compiler
>> -- gcc doesn't have a greatest reputation for optimization although
>> it's been improving.  And, you're also depending on other programmers
>> to write good benchmarks.
> 
> Yep, looking at the source code for the test, my first impression is that 
> most of the time is likely to be taken up with the iostream code.  I also 

Interesting...

> notice that the C-language PCRE test takes almost exactly the same amount of 
> time as the two C++ / Boost-Regex tests, in spite of avoiding high level 
> constructs like std::string.  

Yeah, it makes me generally suspicious about the benchmark quality when a 
scripting language like perl outperforms C -- just because the internals of 
perl (and most everything else for that matter) are written in C.  But in the 
case of regex I guess I can believe that the perl folks may have written a 
highly optimized regex implementation (in C of course) that makes things run fast.

 > Might be tempting to try and do better...

As I understand the shootout rules you're free to make it better :-)

Jeff