In Perl, is there a built in way to compare two arrays for equality?

Question

There is the new smart match operator:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;

my @x = (1, 2, 3);
my @y = qw(1 2 3);

say "[@x] and [@y] match" if @x ~~ @y;

Regarding Array::Compare:

Internally the comparator compares the two arrays by using join to turn both arrays into strings and comparing the strings using eq.

I guess that is a valid method, but so long as we are using string comparisons, I would much rather use something like:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use List::AllUtils qw( each_arrayref );

my @x = qw(1 2 3);
my @y = (1, 2, 3);

print "[@x] and [@y] match\n" if elementwise_eq( \(@x, @y) );

sub elementwise_eq {
    my ($xref, $yref) = @_;
    return unless  @$xref == @$yref;

    my $it = each_arrayref($xref, $yref);
    while ( my ($x, $y) = $it->() ) {
        return unless $x eq $y;
    }
    return 1;
}

If the arrays you are comparing are large, joining them is going to do a lot of work and consume a lot of memory than just comparing each element one by one.

Update: Of course, one should test such statements. Simple benchmarks:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Array::Compare;
use Benchmark qw( cmpthese );
use List::AllUtils qw( each_arrayref );

my @x = 1 .. 1_000;
my @y = map { "$_" } 1 .. 1_000;

my $comp = Array::Compare->new;

cmpthese -5, {
    iterator => sub { my $r = elementwise_eq(\(@x, @y)) },
    array_comp => sub { my $r = $comp->compare(\(@x, @y)) },
};

This is the worst case scenario where elementwise_eq has to go through each and every element in both arrays 1_000 times and it shows:

             Rate   iterator array_comp
iterator    246/s         --       -75%
array_comp 1002/s       308%         --

On the other hand, the best case scenario is:

my @x = map { rand } 1 .. 1_000;
my @y = map { rand } 1 .. 1_000;

              Rate array_comp   iterator
array_comp   919/s         --       -98%
iterator   52600/s      5622%         --

iterator performance drops quite quickly, however:

my @x = 1 .. 20, map { rand } 1 .. 1_000;
my @y = 1 .. 20, map { rand } 1 .. 1_000;

              Rate   iterator array_comp
iterator   10014/s         --       -23%
array_comp 13071/s        31%         --

I did not look at memory utilization.

There's Test::More's is_deeply() function, which will also display exactly where the structures differ, or Test::Deep's eq_deeply(), which doesn't require a test harness (and just returns true or false).

Not built-in, but there is Array::Compare.

This is one of the operations that's left out of the Perl core for what I believe are didactic reasons -- that is, if you're trying to do it, there's probably something wrong. The most illustrative example of this, I think, is the absence of a core read_entire_file function; basically, providing that function in the core would lead people to think it's a good idea to do that, but instead, Perl is designed in a way that gently nudges you toward processing files line-at-a-time, which is generally far more efficient and otherwise a better idea, but novice programmers are rarely comfortable with it and they need some encouragement to get there.

The same applies here: there is probably a much better way to make the determination you're trying to accomplish by comparing two arrays. Not necessarily, but probably. So Perl is nudging you to think about other ways of accomplishing your goal.

Perl 5.10 gives you the smart match operator.

use 5.010;

if( @array1 ~~ @array2 )
{
    say "The arrays are the same";
}

Otherwise, as you said, you'll have top roll your own.

So long as you are using perl 5.10 or newer, you can use the smart match operator.

if (@array1 ~~ @array2) {...}