My two strongest reactions are:

  1. Please, please, please don't put in a "real" garbage collector. The two arguments seem to be improved performance and circular references. Yet, the research on garbage collection, right after it states that "mark and sweep" is more efficient, notes that users of "mark and sweep" can spend most of their time collecting garbage. I don't find circular references to be much of a problem (at least 98% of the complaints I've seen about lack of memory in Perl did not involve circular references). I already hear a lot more complaints about non-timely destructor activation than about circular references. The non-deterministic and very delayed activation of destructors plus the periodic load fluctuation of a "real" garbage collector will create orders of magnitide more complaints than the current overhead and circular reference "problems" have.
  2. Many of the goals seem far from realistic. In particular, they start by stating that the core needs to be shrunk, requesting that lots of core stuff be moved out into separate modules (and mention a few simple items that can be move out) and then half of the remaining suggestions involve complex items that need to be handled by the core, some of which are currently handled rather nicely by modules.

It sounds like they are trying to please everyone, trying to make Perl perfect for all environments and all problems. This, of course, is impossible. This doesn't sound like Perl 6, this sounds like Sperl, some other language losely based on Perl.

I think they will be forced to mostly drop most of those suggestions (I hope they will realize this fairly early in the process). So my biggest worry is that Perl 6 will be saddled with garbage collection.

In reply to RE: What's Wrong With Perl? by tye
in thread What's Wrong With Perl? by davorg

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