On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 12:33:45AM +0100, gvim wrote: > The Perl 6 binary within the January release of Rakudo Star > is 10Mb on my Snow Leopard system. Do I take it that the > Perl 6 binary is [...] much larger than the current > Perl 5.12 (1.6Mb) or is it simply that the Perl 6 binary > is likely to lose more weight during the refinement process? > In other words, is there a ballpark for how big the > Perl 6 binary will be when development settles down?
Comparing any Perl 6 binary against the Perl 5 binary is very much an apples-to-oranges comparison. For one, Perl 6 has far more features than Perl 5 -- for a fairer comparison, compare Perl 6 to (Perl 5 + Moose + Regexp::Grammars + ...). Also, the Rakudo Perl 6 binary is not really a "binary" in the normal "machine code compiled from C" sense. Most of what the "binary" contains is Parrot objects and bytecode. We can actually make the "perl6" executable file itself as small as 50K, but the first thing it then does is load a several-megabyte Parrot bytecode library. But overall answer to your question -- yes, we expect that improvements in Parrot (better serialization, better bytecode formats, better object system) will enable us to significantly reduce the current size of the perl6 executable. I don't know by how much, but a 50% reduction in size doesn't seem unrealistic. Pm
