http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=697444

vrk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear fellow monks,

unfortunately I no longer have the amounts of free time I used to, so I cannot dig an answer to this question from mailing lists, FAQs, and other online resources. The question is also ambiguous, apologies. Simply put, what kinds of scientific computing will be easier in Perl 6 compared to Perl 5, and will it be possible to apply it to a wider range of number crunching?

Currently, if I were to spend hours and days of computer time on simulations, for instance, I would reach for PDL. But won't PDL be outdated and incompatible with Rakudo + Parrot? Or can one call external C and Fortran libraries from within Parrot? There may be further complications, but a more interesting question is, do any of the new language features obsolete PDL?

Premature optimization is the root of all evil, but since Perl 6 will have hyperoperators and junctions, would it not be possible to replace PDL's threading model with those? People hype about parallel processing, but efficiently looping over an array of a dozen million floating point numbers would be very nice indeed.

Perhaps the question is more about Parrot internals than Perl 6; will it ever be possible to tune the virtual machine to handle large arrays of numbers at "near-C" execution speed?

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print "Just Another Perl Adept\n";