APM: Optimizing perl compiler

[Reini Urban]

Your new president Will posted something about his overly ambitious goal 
for YAPC::US 2013 in beautiful Austin (Yeah!) on perlmonks 
(http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=987033).

I am the maintainer of the perl compiler B::C/B::CC,
Mark Lehmann is the only significant other perl dev with a compiler, 
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Faster.
I moved to Houston to work full-time on the compiler last year, which 
became stable in December 2012 with version 1.42.

I thought we will should discuss such an effort and ideas in one of the 
next Austin.pm meetings.

cPanel is using the non-optimizing compiler B::C in production for 
several years with 5.6, and will switch soon to the latest B::C version 
with 5.14.

B::CC or other efforts can only profit from an optionally tighter 
language, with const and types. I prepared some nice and easy proposals 
already. See http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=987125
But I'm not confident that p5p wants to discuss this at all. So I'm not 
too optimistic to get const or type support at all to be able to 
optimize perl.

The fallback plan is to use something like perl 7 which looks like this: 
http://www.qore.org/
The current XS API might have to go, as XS function calls should not 
pick up their args from a perl array, rather from the C run-time stack.
Several ideas were outlined here:
   http://corehackers.perl.org/wiki/index.php5?title=Main_Page

In October I'm there for the Austin Film Festival, but my schedule is 
tight because there are many good films not to miss. So September would 
be best. August is full with p5 meetings in Europe.
-- 
Reini

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