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Groovy vs Perl: What are the differences?
Syntax and readability: Groovy is known for its cleaner and more concise syntax, making it easier to read and write code compared to Perl. Groovy's syntax is more similar to Java, which can be beneficial for developers coming from a Java background. On the other hand, Perl is known for its complex and sometimes cryptic syntax, which can make it more challenging for beginners to understand and maintain code.
Object-oriented programming: Groovy is a fully object-oriented language that supports features like classes, objects, and inheritance, making it easier to write modular and reusable code. In contrast, Perl was originally designed as a scripting language and lacks some of the advanced object-oriented programming features present in Groovy.
Community and libraries: Groovy has a smaller but more focused community compared to Perl. Groovy's community is known for its strong support for web development frameworks like Grails and Ratpack. Conversely, Perl has a larger and more diverse community with a wide range of libraries and modules available for various tasks such as text processing, system administration, and web development.
Ease of integration with Java: One of the key advantages of Groovy is its seamless integration with Java. Groovy code can be easily mixed with Java code in the same project, allowing developers to leverage existing Java libraries and frameworks. Perl, on the other hand, has limited integration capabilities with Java and other languages, making it less suitable for projects that require interoperability with Java code.
Performance: In terms of performance, Groovy tends to be faster than Perl due to its compilation to bytecode and its close relationship with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Perl, being an interpreted language, can be slower in execution compared to Groovy, especially for computationally intensive tasks.
Community adoption and job opportunities: Groovy, being part of the Java ecosystem, enjoys higher adoption in enterprise environments and a greater demand for developers with Groovy skills. Perl, although still widely used in certain domains like system administration and bioinformatics, has seen a decline in popularity in recent years, leading to fewer job opportunities for Perl developers in comparison to Groovy developers.
In Summary, Groovy and Perl differ in syntax and readability, object-oriented capabilities, community support and libraries, integration with Java, performance, and job opportunities in the industry.
I intend to use a programming language which I'll use as AWS runtime and write a script that will comb through tons of files in a directory and its subdirectories and search for simple text regular expressions and process and write the matches in a file as output. I have heard that Perl is good for regex based search but I also want the performance to be good as it will have to go through tons of files for IO. In this post: https://filia-aleks.medium.com/aws-lambda-battle-2021-performance-comparison-for-all-languages-c1b441005fd1, I see that Rust works well as AWS Lambda runtime with very good performance. Which one should I choose as my AWS lambda runtime for this problem? Golang is also an option as it is fast as per the above link.
I used to work in a Perl shop and must admit that the language is very simple for tasks like these, but as you mentioned it's not fast at execution time. I'm now a Go programmer professionally but I taught myself the language while in college purely out of interest and eventually found my way to the job, not the other way around. I've recently been learning a little rust because of how much that language comes up in conversations around Go. I find the concept of the borrow checker nice but I have to admit I feel lost like I am in most flavors of new fancy framework js. That's not to say Rust is really anything like js, but the learning appears the same to me as someone who's convinced they could learn just about any programming language if it was necessary (over time I've seen procedural, OOP, declarative and functional stuff but never programming logic outside of the prolog code I wrote in school).
Go isn't made for your specific task at hand but it's a very easy language to pick up and it has good directory traversal standard library code and good regex (even though with time perl's has been optimized to be faster and I think it's written in C++) but more than anything Go is "cloud native" programming in that an awful lot of new microservice tech stacks are centered around it, docker and kubernetes are written in it, and there's a thriving community whose focus is generally web-first and performance-oriented. This means for your use case there might already be a large cohort of gophers that have asked the stackoverflow questions for you
I personally would push you towards the NYT Profiler for Perl before I would towards Rest, but that's because I know you wouldn't waste any time being able to get to the task at hand and then make it go faster, and I expect all but a few rustaceans would be able to do so with the same speed.
Whatever you pick I wish you the very best of luck!
Pros of Groovy
- Java platform44
- Much more productive than java33
- Concise and readable29
- Very little code needed for complex tasks28
- Dynamic language22
- Nice dynamic syntax for the jvm13
- Very fast9
- Can work with JSON as an object7
- Easy to setup7
- Supports closures (lambdas)6
- Literal Collections6
- Syntactic sugar3
- Optional static typing3
- Developer Friendly2
Pros of Perl
- Lots of libraries72
- Open source66
- Text processing61
- Powerful54
- Unix-style49
- Regex47
- Stable37
- Concise syntax32
- Hackerish29
- Easy to use22
- Swiss army chainsaw15
- Code Less Do More13
- CPAN12
- Freedom9
- All purpose8
- Many ways to do it5
- Familiar5
- Readability5
- Community5
- Modular4
- Smart (does alot for you)4
- Object-Oriented4
- Postmodern3
- It's the best one-off task language3
- For a man2
- Good man pages2
- Auto case variables1
- Single Source Library (CPAN)1
- Multi-threaded support1
- Hashes1
- C-style1
- Multiparadigm1
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Cons of Groovy
- Groovy Code can be slower than Java Code3
- Absurd syntax1
- Objects cause stateful/heap mess1
Cons of Perl
- Messy $/@/% syntax4
- No exception handling3
- Bad OO support2
- "1;"2
- No OS threads2
- Variables are global by default1
- Copy-on-create for interpreter-based threads1
- Barewords1
- Errors/warnings are ignored by default1
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