"Rakud'oh!": Making our compiler smarter

By Jonathan Worthington
Date: Sunday, 15 May 2011 13:10
Duration: 40 minutes
Target audience: Intermediate
Language: English
Tags: 6 rakudo 蝶

The Rakudo Star release delivered a compiler that implemented a great deal of Perl 6 language features. It provided an opportunity for more people to come and play with the Perl 6 language, and since its release the module ecosystem has grown, both in terms of modules available and tooling.

Along with the good news comes the bad. Rakudo today is slow, memory hungry, not always especially helpful or prompt in telling you why your programs don't work and does less well in the area of language extensibility - one of the key goals of Perl 6.

In this talk I'll look at some of the reasons for the performance issues, and discuss the work that is currently being done - or planned for over the next few months - to make things better.