3 ms·

Perl 5. Perl is awesome and versatile, and it's the fastest scripting language in common usage.

by IslaDeEncanta 10y ago

throwaway7645 10y ago
Ever benchmark it against Lua? But yea a whole lot more people use Perl.
- krylon 10y ago
  Lua feels awkward to me when used as a standalone scripting language. When embedded into a C host applications, it is really nice, though. There is also a port of Lua 5.2 to Go, which has a slighty confusing API (to me, at least), but the documentation makes up for that.
  - etiene 10y ago
    I use Lua standalone and I gotta say I love it :)
    - mmjaa 10y ago
      Ditto. Its my favourite language. You can do all things with it.
      - krylon 10y ago
        The language itself is very, very, very nice, don't get me wrong. But the standard library is very small (deliberately), and while LuaRocks is fun, Perl, Ruby, and Python have a lot more libraries available. Plus, concurrency in Lua is ... nontrivial I loved concurrentlua, an attempt to implement Erlang-style message passing in Lua, with coroutines instead of processes. But it was kind of a pain to get it to work, and I think it was unmaintained. When using Lua as a standalone language, this situation bothers me enough to stick with Perl or Python. However, when using it as an embedded scripting language, it is not a problem at all, because you will probably supply whatever library/API you want to be scriptable yourself. At that point you only care about the language itself and the API of its runtime, which is - IMHO! - where Lua really shines.
        etiene 10y ago
        Well, it is true that the Lua ecosystem is small, but I've been following it for years and it has been in a steady growth. Yea, it does depend on which problem you're trying to solve. I'm using it on Machine Learning now and there are many libraries available on LuaRocks for that.
- IslaDeEncanta 10y ago
  Perl is faster in the benchmarks I've seen, although it's difficult to really measure most real world use.

Perl 5. Perl is awesome and versatile, and it's the fastest scripting language in common usage.

throwaway7645 10y ago

Ever benchmark it against Lua? But yea a whole lot more people use Perl.

krylon 10y ago
Lua feels awkward to me when used as a standalone scripting language. When embedded into a C host applications, it is really nice, though. There is also a port of Lua 5.2 to Go, which has a slighty confusing API (to me, at least), but the documentation makes up for that.
- etiene 10y ago
  I use Lua standalone and I gotta say I love it :)
  - mmjaa 10y ago
    Ditto. Its my favourite language. You can do all things with it.
    - krylon 10y ago
      The language itself is very, very, very nice, don't get me wrong. But the standard library is very small (deliberately), and while LuaRocks is fun, Perl, Ruby, and Python have a lot more libraries available. Plus, concurrency in Lua is ... nontrivial I loved concurrentlua, an attempt to implement Erlang-style message passing in Lua, with coroutines instead of processes. But it was kind of a pain to get it to work, and I think it was unmaintained. When using Lua as a standalone language, this situation bothers me enough to stick with Perl or Python. However, when using it as an embedded scripting language, it is not a problem at all, because you will probably supply whatever library/API you want to be scriptable yourself. At that point you only care about the language itself and the API of its runtime, which is - IMHO! - where Lua really shines.
      - etiene 10y ago
        Well, it is true that the Lua ecosystem is small, but I've been following it for years and it has been in a steady growth. Yea, it does depend on which problem you're trying to solve. I'm using it on Machine Learning now and there are many libraries available on LuaRocks for that.
IslaDeEncanta 10y ago
Perl is faster in the benchmarks I've seen, although it's difficult to really measure most real world use.