I think most people would like to see perlcc revived. If it is as impossible as you are making it out to be, then I for one welcome a YAPC talk on the failed persuit of reviving the compiler. Perhaps the goal is too ambitious for the time allotted, but I don't see why that should halt side-projects. | [reply] |
I too would like to see perlcc revived and it appears that it is already being revived by Reini Urban on CPAN. What I think is way too ambitious, especially for the timeframe suggested, is the OP's stated performance goal of "making Perl run at speeds within an order of magnitude of optimized C".
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Right, well I too feel that premature optimization is the route to all evil. I personally would find it hard to compete with native C; however, I do recall Java having similar speed issues (it being non-natively compiled). Then (over the course of a decade) everyone swapped out boxes for VMs... Virtual Machines which, perhaps inspired by slowness, happened to use the speed which a Java program runs as a common benchmark. So everyone started optimizing their VMs to run Java programs quickly. We are now at that point where Java can run as fast (or faster) than a "native" application (clearly depending on your environment and how you define native).
I didn't know Reini was doing something like this... am checking it out now.
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