Keep in mind the date it was written -- this was before SSDs and in the days of tiny heaps. Any improvement upon seek times of what were then commodity disks (S

Keep in mind the date it was written -- this was before SSDs and in the days of tiny heaps. Any improvement upon seek times of what were then commodity disks (SCSI/SAS being insanely expensive and out of bradfitz' reach, afaik) would easily dominate the cost of Perl's runtime (which, in retrospect, isn't horribly bad -- the GC and VM are more mature and less trouble-prone than most common scripting languages, although nowhere near LuaJit or any modern Scheme/Common Lisp implementation).