in reply to High Performance Perl

UPDATE: I've been unclear. Allow me to try again: As I understand it, Perl must be interpretted, rendered as bytecode, and executed. The question is this: how good is that bytecode, and similar/different is it from a compiled binary?

I am asking because if the bytecode generated is good, why can't we distribute the bytecode rather than the source - skipping a run-time step and improving the performance along the way?

Well, there's been efforts to create a perl compiler that does pretty much what you suggest, in an efficient way. The UNIX effort was called "perlcc", and I believe there's a Windows attempt as well. It's a hard problem, and hasn't been very successful (ie. after over five years work, the results are still marked "experimental"; perlcc now compiles a sample "hello,world" program, but still crashed on me (as of last year) trying to compile a program of reasonable size (3,000 lines or so, plus modules).

--
Ytrew

In Section Meditations