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in reply to Re: Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances
in thread Rakudo Perl 6 and MoarVM Performance Advances

I'm not confident that Perl6 will ever be anywhere near Perl 5 for common use cases such as this.

In Perl 5 regular expressions are handled by an ad-hoc, highly-optimized matcher (it's like a different interpreter). In Perl 6 (well, Rakudo, actually) I believe they are just compiled into regular "bytecode" which is then executed by the virtual machine as any other perl 6 code.

Perl 6 approach is much more generic and powerful but it would take a while until all the involved layers get as fast as the ad-hoc perl5 matcher. In the worst case, Rakudo could just fall-back to the perl 5 approach for simple regular expressions.