The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

C and Perl

I spent some time yesturday playing with Grey Matter, which seems to be one of the more popular blogging software packages out there. I downloaded it, partly out of curiosity and partly for a project I'm working on (and yes, I'm scoping out the competition).

Now, I can see why Grey Matter is popular: it installs very easily (I had it running in a few minutes), is template driven (so the output can look exactly like you want it to) and … it's in Perl.

Which means—if the web server allows CGI, you can run Grey Matter. There is no compiling. Just stick it in, make sure the location of Perl in the scripts is correct, and go.

I think that reason alone, is why Perl is pretty much used everywhere on the World Wide Web.

Now, my software that runs this site is in C. One, I can't stand Perl. Never had. And thankfully, I've never had to maintain Perl code either. Two, tower (the server that runs this site) is a 486. A 33MHz 486. By today's standards the machine shouldn't be running, much less running a website. You can't even give 486 based machines away, which is sad, since they work. This site is proof. But anyway, this machine is slow, and running a blog written in Perl would be torture indeed.

Like Grey Matter. I'm doing my testing of it on a 120MHz machine and Grey Matter is SSS-LLL-OOO-WWW. Not quite painfully slow (painfully slow would be running it on tower) but too slow to be used by more than a few people on my local box here.

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