Hi Will,
sorry if I did not answered earlier, I saw your answer a couple of days ago, but I was on a trip 600 miles from home with only limited access to the Internet through a mobile device, and not really able to look in detail to your links. I have now gone through your links rather extensively.
Your project seems quite interesting to me. To tell the truth, at least 95% of the time, I am just happy enough with Perl's speed, I am really interested with Perl's expressive power and ease of coding something real in a relatively few lines of code. Now, having said that, there are the perhaps 5% left where I could have use of higher performance and would be willing to give up some of what you call high magic syntax for that speed improvement. Although if regexes and coderefs, to name just some of these features, are part of the forbidden high magic, then I am not sure I am willing to give that up.
OK, I understand that you need to start with a subset of Perl because you can't include all the features of Perl in just one go. But is the Rperl project much more than something akin to XS or Inline::You_name_it compiling into C++ a language whose syntax is vaguely similar to "Baby Perl"? If that's all there is to it, that's a bit far away from the hype you are doing around it.
I might still buy it if I can write my program in normal full-fledged Perl (or my own subset of Perl, some of the high magic features, I probably don't use anyway, and some others not too often or very rarely) and have low-magic super-fast subroutines confined to a part of the program or an auxiliary module (just as I could write most of my application in Perl and in-line for example some C code for some limited speed-critical computation). What I have read on your Web pages seems to indicate that this should be possible, but I haven't seen any example showing how practical this would be.
My problem, though, is that your Web pages seem to be more oriented towards hype (and fund raising, nothing pejorative in my view when I say that) than toward actually giving us means of actually using and testing Rperl, and perhaps even possibly help you in this project possibly with other means than just contributing cash (after all, Perl Monks has a lot of incredibly gifted individuals, very knowledgeable with Perl and other IT-related topics).
In brief, I wish I could easily download a demo, standard Perl and Rperl, see and understand the code, run it, perhaps modify it, and see the results for myself.
OK, having said all that, back to your OP. My knowledge of Perl is part of the reason I am earning a very decent income, better than ever before, I think I can spare a few bucks for your piggy bank, and I will contribute to your project as soon as I finish writing this post, but only for a small amount at this point because I would need more (or perhaps some thing else) from you to be fully convinced.
I sincerely hope that you will be able to bring this project to success.
