[MacPerl] Re: More on possible slowness of perl 5 MPW tool on Mac

[Matthias Ulrich Neeracher <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>]

[Vincent was the guy who observed that the MacPerl MPW tool was drastically
slower for Perl5 than for Perl4, and sent me a test case].

After a few hours of testing, I found out that the Perl5 MPW tool had a bug
in memory allocation that caused it to hit the worst case in performance for
every allocation > 64 bytes. While this effect would be hard to trace in
ordinary scripts, Vincent's test case happened to do several thousand such
allocations in a tight loop, which made the effect pop out.

With this problem fixed, the perl 5 tool is now faster than the perl 4 tool.
Thanks to Vincent for reporting this case.

Matthias
PS: The above is no indication that the next MacPerl release is impending.
   There is still a lot to do.

-----
Matthias Neeracher   <neeri@iis.ee.ethz.ch>   http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~neeri
  "And that's why I am going to turn this world upside down, and make
   of it a fire so *bright* that someone real will notice"
                                -- Vernor Vinge, _Tatja Grimm's World_