Difference between Perl and Ruby

Last Updated : 27 Feb, 2023

Perl is a general-purpose, high level interpreted and dynamic programming language. It was developed by Larry Wall, in 1987. Perl was originally developed for text processing like extracting the required information from a specified text file and for converting the text file into a different form. Perl supports both procedural and Object-Oriented programming. Perl is a lot similar to C syntactically and is easy for the users who have knowledge of C, C++.

Perl

# Simple Perl program 
#!/usr/bin/perl 
   
# Below line will print 
# "Welcome to GeeksforGeeks!" 
print "Welcome to GeeksforGeeks!\n";

Output:

Welcome to GeeksforGeeks!

Ruby is a pure Object-Oriented language developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto (also known as Matz in the Ruby community) in the mid 1990’s in Japan. Everything in Ruby is an object except the blocks but there are replacements too for it i.e procs and lambda. The objective of Ruby’s development was to make it act as a sensible buffer between human programmers and the underlying computing machinery. Ruby has a similar syntax to that of many programming languages like C and Java, so it is easy for Java and C programmers to learn. It supports mostly all platforms like Windows, Mac, Linux.

Ruby

# Simple Ruby program
puts "Welcome to GeeksforGeeks!"

Output:

Welcome to GeeksforGeeks!

Difference between Perl and Ruby :

Perl	Ruby
It was initially released in 1987.	It was initially released in 1994.
Perl is a high level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language.	Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented, reflective, general-purpose programming language.
It is less Object-Oriented language.	It is a pure and highly Object-Oriented language.
The number of libraries present in Perl is less than Ruby.	The number of libraries present in Ruby is more than comparing to Perl.
Its support for Unicode is much stronger than Ruby.	Its support for Unicode is not as strong as Perl.
The file extension used for Perl is “.pl”.	The file extension used for Ruby is “.rb”.
It has a very good number of libraries when it comes to supporting regular expression.	Its support for regular expression is less when compared to Perl.
Framework for Perl are Catalyst, Mojolicious and mod_perl.	Frameworks for Ruby are Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Ramaz.
It supports multiple variable types.	It has only one variable type.
The performance of Perl in terms of execution is very fast.	The execution speed of Ruby scripts decent enough.
Perl is most often used in CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripting along with C for web servers and hence used widely in the world of server technology.	Ruby is strong in meta-programming, which allows creating a fabulous product like Vagrant.
It is ideal for both web application development and system administration.	It is ideal for those applications which have heavy traffic.
Perl is being supported by Perlmonks, which is termed as the best programming language community.	Ruby is supported by google groups or with forums.