[Melbourne-pm] perl6.org

[Shlomi Fish]

On Wednesday 12 May 2010 07:12:13 Toby Corkindale wrote:
> On 12/05/10 12:43, Toby Corkindale wrote:
> > This isn't going well.
> > I went to http://dev.perl.org/perl6/
> > Then I clicked on the link to "Perl 6 site", which went to
> > http://perl6.org/, which redirected to http://feather.perl6.nl/syn/
> > Which failed to load.
> > 
> > I tried going to Pugs, which was linked as "Try Perl 6 today!", which
> > goes to www.pugscode.org, which fails to load too.
> > 
> > I am now at http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads which at least
> > loads; we'll see how well it compiles.
> 
> It compiled OK, but note that it required network access during the
> build process, and also required that subversion was installed.
> 
> They're not kidding about the performance of Perl6 being.. poor.. at the
> moment:
> 
> $ time ./hello.pl
> Hello earth
> Hello sky
> 
> real	0m0.021s
> user	0m0.016s
> sys	0m0.008s
> 
> 
> $ time ./hello.p6
> Hello earth.
> Hello sky.
> 
> real	0m2.075s
> user	0m1.928s
> sys	0m0.140s
> 
> On the other hand, it seems to be doing slightly better than Scala :)
> $ time scala HelloScala
> Hello earth
> Hello sky
> 
> real	0m2.178s
> user	0m2.192s
> sys	0m0.108s
> 
> 
> And for good measure, here's Google's Go language:
> $ time ./6.out
> Hello earth.
> Hello sky.
> 
> real	0m0.002s
> user	0m0.000s
> sys	0m0.000s
> 
> 
> 
> None of these are terribly good performance tests though.. they're more
> a measure of the start-up time! Go has none, since it's compiled to
> native code.. perl5 is interpreted, but otherwise written in native
> code. Both Scala and Perl6 are running on bytecode VMs.

Actually, perl 5 compiles Perl 5 into its own internal bytecode, and it has a 
virtual machine for executing it (though very different from either Parrot 
(Rakudo's virtual machine) or the JVM). I don't know why Scala is so slow, but 
it's possible you're affected by the notorious long Java startup time. I was 
told it was fixed in JDK 1.5.x, but I haven't tried it yet. That or it is 
possible that the Scala compiler has some overhead.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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