Perl is a shockingly amazing language, but it's VERY old fashioned, it's designed to be very close to the metal, so it's stunningly fast, unless you make mistakes and create bottlenecks. I hated it when I started, because it's very hard on a conceptual level, because unlike python, that is many many layers above bare metal, Perl is as close as you can get as a scripting language, so it's just amazingly fast.
Perl also shares another feature that only bash and awk have, running on everything from any era after 2005, which is why original inxi was done in bash/gawk, but gawk itself is not always installed, so it was a problem, but the real problem is that trying to write and maintain a large program done in bash/gawk is simply insane, I wish I'd switched years earlier because Perl is faster and more powerful in every way.
I run heavy duty Perl optimizers on inxi every year or so, to catch the latest bottlenecks, and consistently speed up inxi in every area that perl can be sped up, that's why its features expand continuously but its execution speed does not increase nearly as much as the features and code do. I found a new debugger tool this time that let me find and trim off significant bottlenecks in internal core inxi tools, which are used a lot as inxi executes.
But perl has some things that are so close to the metal that your brain simply doesn't perceive reality in that way, at least mine didn't, and still doesn't in some areas, but the thing with perl is, when you learn it, you are learning how your hardware works, because you have to make your brain adapt to how it really works, not some wrapper layers above it that hide all that from you. That's why it's so darned fast though.
There was literally only 1 language in the world that met the requirements of inxi:
1. reliable, run by adults, and doesn't break every major release (that latter instantly excluded python from ever being considered)
2. FAST.
3. stable, over generations, so inxi code from 2021 runs fine on operating systems and hardware from 2005 or so, I test inxi / pinxi on a 1998 200mhz laptop, running a very old debian stable, I think it's lenny?
4. Powerful, allows advanced, complex data structures, without the horrible convoluted hacks I had to resort to with bash>gawk.
I believe and am fairly certain I am not wrong, that the set of languages on the planet that meets these core requirements has exactly one member, Perl 5. inxi has already been testing using some perl 7 test modules and passed, so it looks good for inxi on perl 7, which is just the next major version of perl 5. perl 6 became roku, and rightfully is not considered the next perl anymore, it's a new language.
If you want to see the raw execution time of inxi, run whatever command you want with --sleep 0, that knocks off 0.35 second sleep time to let the cpu spin down and return a roughly correct non inxi executing cpu speed. That's for any CPU line item.
I'm also seeing a slowdown from some SSDs when they report their drive temps using the new drivetemp module from linux kernel, but it seems to vary, I saw between 200 and 20 milliseconds on Intel SSDs, which is several hundred times longer than it should take normally.