VelociPerl

by SoftMax Labs

Your dad's Perl but way faster

About

At our data science consultancy we love Perl, and think it’s the ideal language for data wrangling. Unfortunately, it has not kept up with other dynamic languages in terms of performance. VelociPerl (or vPerl), a speed and safety oriented fork of Perl is our answer to that.

VelociPerl brings the venerable language up to the performance needed for data analysis workloads in the thundering 2020s. It’s 100% compatible with all existing Perl and XS code.

vPerl Personal Edition benchmarks:

benchmarks

Features

Speed: vPerl Personal Edition is currently 45% faster on average than stock Perl, vPerl Enterprise Edition is 70% faster (and improving). Our goal is 2-3x speedup.
Safety: vPerl Enterprise is compiled with low-overhead runtime sanitizers and more security focused compiler flags. Moreover, because we dropped support for lesser-known platforms the source code is smaller and contains less undefined behavior.
Compatibility: vPerl passes the entire perl5 test suite and runs any Perl and XS code unmodified.

How

By focusing exclusively on modern hardware and compilers. vPerl also uses a new bytecode representation and evaluation mechanism.