note moritz <p>There are lots of hurdles that prevent porting of Perl 5 to a different backend than what it currently has, and Parrot in particular: <ul> <li>Perl 5 is not specified, but dictated by the current implementation</li> <li>Perl 5 has some weird behavior in quite many places, and it's nigh impossible to reproduce the same behavior with a different implementation</li> <li>XS. Do I need to say more?</li> <li>Whenever you port a high-level language with as many quirks as Perl 5 has to a different runtime that wasn't specifically designed to support it, you get quite some runtime overhead, making the port slower than the C implementation, even if the new backend is faster in places.</li> <li>Parrot still lacks the maturity that Perl 5 needs in lots of areas (IO, threads, performance).</li> <li>Man power. Porting any non-trivial language to $anywhere is a huge effort, and needs hackers that stay committed over a long time, and invest vast amounts of time and energy.</li> </ul> <p>While many folks agree that having Perl 5 on Parrot would be a nice thing, that alone simply isn't enough to make it happen.</p> <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-616540"> [http://perl6.org/|Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed] </div></div> 1005794 1005794