Jan
08
The Fastest Development Language Might Not Be The One You Suspect
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I’ve been working on some behind-the-scenes software for my Unique Blog Content service recently. There is one piece of the process that uses an iterative text-processing routine, which then dumps the output to a text file. (If you’re not a developer, that line might not mean much to you, but then this post won’t be of interest either, so I won’t explain what ‘iterative’ means).
I wrote the code in AutoIt, and it took about 20-25 minutes to do 1000 files. “Too slow”, I thought. So I re-wrote it in Visual Basic 6. It also took about 20 minutes, even when compiled into an executable, so top marks to the AutoIt team for matching Microsoft.
I then re-wrote it in PHP, as I wanted to add the ability to process nested regular expressions, which wasn’t made available until vb.net, which I don’t know how to program in.
PHP, running on my desktop (via phpDock) still, not on a souped-up server, took 2 minutes to do the same task (actually, a slightly more complicated one, because of the additional recursion within the regular expression).
Go figure…
