Aug 1, 2018 - Whether you are a programmer who is taking the first steps to convert your Perl 5 code to Perl 6 and encountering some issues or you're just. ![]() An Open Letter to the Perl Community Jan 17, 2018 by The past few months I’ve been wracking my brain on how to bring (or perl, as in the version of Perl that is maintained by the Perl 5 Porters) and (or perl6, as in the implementation of Perl 6 based on NQP and ) closer together again. Yes, I haven’t given up on this idea, although my first attempt (organizing the ) hasn’t really worked out the way I had hoped it would. But it did have some positive effects, because it brought together people from the Perl community that normally would never have been in a discussion, and some nice advances were made for Perl 6. I am still interested in getting Perl 5 and Perl 6 together, because they both share the same Perl Mindset, a mix of just enough DWIM (Do What I Mean) and not too much of (What is it doing now???). I know Perl 6 has had a complicated development process. You could argue that Perl 6 is the fourth implementation attempt. It is also the first Perl 6 implementation that actually works, interfaces seamlessly with and or any out of the box, is beating Perl 5 on more and more, and is being used in production, especially in the area of. Some consider Perl 6 to be a sister language to Perl 5. Personally, I consider Perl 6 more of a genetically engineered daughter language with the best genes from many parents. A daughter with a difficult childhood, in which she alienated many, who is now getting out of puberty into early adulthood. But I digress. The Butterfly Perl 5 Project There is no clear upgrade path from Perl 5 to Perl 6 and this means that there is no chance of combining Perl 5 and Perl 6 to become more than the sum of their parts. The Perl 5 Porters are still adding features that are inspired by Perl 6, which further confuses the picture. A radical idea would be that the Perl 5 Porters would go back to their original goal: porting Perl 5. But this time, not to different operating systems, but porting Perl 5 to different Virtual Machines. Place a moratorium on new features, with development confined to maintenance on the current runtime. This would safeguard the most valued feature of Perl 5, its stability and backwards compatibility. But I digress again. Porting Perl 5 to NQP (Not Quite Perl, one of the implementation languages of Rakudo Perl 6) would provide such a migration path. Basically this would be the revival of the project, which implements a version of Perl 5 as a slang (sub-language) of Perl 6. Office 365 calendar app mac. Such an effort would provide a clear migration path from the 30 year old perl interpreter to a modern VM, allowing execution of Perl 5 source code on MoarVM, JVM and JavaScript backends. Thus guaranteeing a life for Perl 5 as a programming language way into the future, taking advantage of all the multi-processing features that a modern VM provides. In the short term, it would still be slower than Perl 5, but in the long run it would be running faster. This is because of the Just-In-Time compilation of hot code, which optimizes all source code to machine code on the fly, rather than the path of hand-optimizing hot code into XS. Although I wholeheartedly would support a Butterfly Perl 5 Project, I’ve also come to the conclusion that it is no longer an itch I would want to scratch personally at this moment.
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