> > > 1.Benchmarks of text processing programs show improved performance on
> > perl6 over perl5.
> >
> > Yes, but how much improved? Is 50% in everyone's minds, or is 10%
> > enough? How much improvement is feasible?
>
> As a first approximation to what is realistic, I'm going to put 10%
> in. Everyone's welcome to suggest better numbers.
Not sure if that's much better. What benchmarks? I'll be happy if my
program runs twice as fast and yours runs twice as slowly. (Maybe that's
just because I'm an *sshole.) But your handwavey "representative
benchmark" sounds good enough for me.
I just wonder if a 10% improvement on some benchmark is worth writing a
new language for. A 100% improvement on a single "representative
real-world task" would be a lot more persuasive. But much more
convincing would be allowing perl to be embedded as a scripting language
in places where it couldn't before because it's too slow. Or if it
allowed some of my quick & dirty prototypes to be usable as production
components.
Speed is a small issue for me with perl5, and I suspect for most people.
But partly that's because if I have something that needs speed, I don't
do it in Perl. For me, the speed of my existing scripts is mostly
irrelevant. CGI people may disagree. Not sure about PDL people, since I
don't know if they spend much time in the interpreter.
> 3.Easier to maintain and understand internals.
This one is more important, and should be possible to quantify. Many
people have professed strong interest in perl, but have kept to Perl
because they were intimidated by the internals. So the goal is to
improve the approachability of the internals, and the metric would
somehow relate to the number of people who can usefully work with perl
code. Number of new patchers, reduction of complaints (ick), number of
new XS modules, Dave Beazley's opinion, ...? What would be really nice
is a real-world example XS' module, and an analysis of the percentage of
code relevant to the problem (the glue problem, not the domain problem.)
Actually, perl5 is enough to evoke a "I know it when I see it, and this
ain't it" reaction from a lot of people. How about the number of beers
required before an average programmer calls an internals snippet
"trivial"?
