I basically agree with everything you've said (at least, everything with which I've enough familiarity to be able to come to a reasonable conclusion), with one exception: I'm convinced of another benefit to "native compilation" (meaning persistent binary executable compilation, of course).

This is really a social benefit, rather than a technical benefit, though it is a technical side-effect that creates this benefit. In particular, I refer to portability. I don't mean portability across platforms, but across implementations of a single platform, via end-users. End-users like having an "installer" that creates an executable program without attendant dependencies. That's often largely irrelevant for Perl on Linux, but highly relevant on Windows systems, where Perl parsers are a rare beast indeed (amongst poplations of people who aren't Perl programmers, at any rate). The ability to simply and easily produce a persistent binary executable that requires no installed parser (or modules/libraries specific to it, for that matter) has I think been a significant advantage for the universalization of C/C++, and the marketing drive to get JVMs of various descriptions installed on every workstation, server, laptop, toaster, and dead badger on the planet by Sun has mitigated this social shortfall for Java enough to overcome that barrier to widespread use of applications developed in that language. Until something written in Perl can be downloaded, one-click "installed", and run on an otherwise "bare bones" MS Windows install (or until MS Windows isn't the default end user OS), we aren't going to see Perl enjoying the same popularity as certain other languages.

The easiest way to achieve that, I think, is to suddenly sprout a compiler of persistent binary executables for Perl.

print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
 - apotheon
CopyWrite Chad Perrin

In reply to Re^2: Perl in the Enterprise by apotheon
in thread Perl in the Enterprise by Scott7477

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