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Perl optimizations are pretty basic, and it compiles fast - which is great for utility scripts, but sometimes it feels like a waste of potential. A lot of Perl code actually runs persistently, either behind mod_perl, plack server, mojolicious server or just as a daemon.

I've been thinking - what if we had a switch (executable flag?) that would turn on additional set of compile time optimizations? It could hypothetically be a big performance win, and not affect programs that need to boot fast. I have close to no experience in XSUB, so that's a big if.

For example, one of my projects has I think close to 100 .pm files and compiles in 800 ms. It will then run for a long time (in production) and require performance. Other than testing and development, I wouldn't mind spending 10 seconds extra if that would mean some crucial parts would run 50% faster. Or maybe I could care less about using small subroutines in tight loops, as they would get inlined.

Comments? Was it attempted already?

In reply to Trading compile time for faster runtime? by melez

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