what's keeping you from writing it?

Perl's a nice language, much more practical than it appears at first, but it's not the only language out there. There is substantial room for improvement (even over what I've seen of Perl 6). Writing a compiler involves a substantially amount of work and I'm careful what I invest my time in. If I were to start such a project I doubt it would end up as a perl native compiler. It may have many similiarities, but it wouldn't be Perl.

When you have finished your compiler, come back and show us to be wrong. Otherwise, just shut up.

Fair enough. I'll pick one of the two :)

As for the original post, the parody was meant as a joke and not as disrespectful to anyone. I haven't yet tried to write a perl native compiler, but I see no theoretical reason why one couldn't produce faster, more efficient code.

Oops, didn't shut up, guess I have to write the compiler now ;).

perl is already written in C, and its has been optimized for years. I see no theoretical reasons why a native compiler produces a faster split function than perl already has. Or faster hashes. Or faster whatever.

Compiling to "native code" isn't going to run your Perl code faster. Unless you are going to sacrifice the flexibility Perl gives you. But then, it's no longer a Perl compiler.

Abigail