Michael Lazzaro writes: > I agree, it is frequently the case that the question of speed is made > critical by people who most assuredly do not need it. But they still > decide that way, and I have found that asserting to them that speed is > not important has been... well, less than effective. I do not doubt > that P6 will be much more competitive, speed-wise, than P5 -- but if it > could actually _win_ a few benchmarks, it would turn my company's use > of Perl from a PR problem to a PR advantage.
In the presence of parrot's JIT, competing should be no problem. I'm not entirely sure Perl 6 will be faster than Perl 5 on the average. But the difference is that Perl 6 will allow you to make fast code where you need it. For instance (and the main one, probably), using native (lowercase) types allows you to JIT, and using JIT is just... well, you have to see it for yourself. Amazing. But since, as I've said, I don't do speed-critical work, I won't be usually using lowercase types. And that trades me flexibility for speed. And from what I've seen of Java, if you need speed, hand-optimizing your inner loop to parrot assembly should blow Java out of the water. Without needing a C compiler (I despise XS). Luke > >your usage patterns may be irrelevant to Perl in the big picture. > > The thought has crossed my mind repeatedly, believe me. > > MikeL >
