So, while I'm still in my profile/optimize mode, I came across judy arrays created by Doug Haskins while at HP, now open sourced. Actually I discovered RJudy first, which led me to Judy, but whatever.
I haven't figured out how I should be using them, yet but they look cool. I didn't see any sort of extension for this on CPAN.
Would Perl benefit from this? I'm hoping to use RJudy to squeeze a few more milliseconds improvement in Ruby's performance, which it needs, while I'm not sure if Perl does.