10 ms·

My perspective is that I'm glad that they are entertaining themselves, but they aren't going to succeed. It is easy to run a subset of Perl 5 faster than Perl

by btilly 8y ago

My perspective is that I'm glad that they are entertaining themselves, but they aren't going to succeed. It is easy to run a subset of Perl 5 faster than Perl 5. But when you add in all of the features, beating Perl 5 on speed becomes hard. It always was the dream to integrate Perl 5 and Perl 6. But cleaning up the internals of Perl 5 until general people could work on it would be a several month project that only a handful of people in the world have the expertise to do. And even if you did that, how do you reconcile Perl 5 reference counting with Perl 6 true garbage collection? The two do not cooperate very well, and a lot more Perl 5 code than you would think relies on things like reliable timing of destruction. On this issue the community has generally been divided into people who think that this won't be doable, and people who think that some day a smart solution will be produced. To date, no smart solution has emerged. Also Perl 6 was a wonderful dream to entertain people, but its real world adoption is..limited. Like it or not, Perl 6 is effectively here and is named Python 3. No, it doesn't look like the Perl 6 people thought it would, but sometimes that is life.

totalperspectiv 8y ago
I'm pretty sure cperl is doing exactly that though: http://perl11.org/cperl/STATUS.html http://perl11.org/cperl/STATUS.html
- mst 8y ago
  cperl is a trainwreck that only exists because the author forked perl5 because he was removed from the maintainance list because he couldn't stop insulting people. Don't bother pretending it'll ever be a viable project - periodically he sends patches trying to force perl5 modules to change their code because his type checking code doesn't work, then follows it up with a volley of insults when the maintainers go "huh?"
  - rurban 8y ago
    cperl is not a trainwreck, only perl5 is. cperl exists because the perl5 maintainers are totally incapable of doing their job, and risking the jobs of thousands of fellow perl5 developers. Most of them already switched to something else in the last years. cperl on the other hand implemented most missing features from the last 15 years in 2-3 years, fixed the worst mistakes, and is 10-30x faster and better developed than perl5. perl5 is dead, it is not going anywhere. You had your chance, but you failed. Now the only thing you have left is doing the culture war thing, throwing around CoC accusations. Having no faith, insulting the devs. Typechecking errors? There are occasional errors because of adding more strictness and warnings from perl6 (strict names, hashpairs, ...) and some internal test and bignum modules are typed for 2x faster performance and to catch typical errors at compile-time. There's an API, and the types reflect that. The problem is that the implementations and the users don't care about the API at all, and neither about typechecks catching these errors. There are no volleys of insults to any maintainers at all. You still don't get the difference between necessary technical and professional criticism and personal attacks. In fact p5p is throwing around personal attacks and insults all the time. E.g. you are one of the main examples of immature racism in your very public YAPC talks, accusing all Germans to be Assholes (in allcaps) for years. Thought about that once? Why do you think you were not accepted as pumpkin and again the technical most incapable person was elected? p5p had their chance to do anything with the language in the last 15 years, they had a proper design and spec and sister languages doing the same. They did nothing, all attempts failed and they blocked all improvements from outside. There's no proper management, no process. Either you are committer, then you can do what you want, or not, then you may not do anything. Well, in fact there are only 4-6 bad apples at the top. The rest is doing good, but silent. But the TPM board is protecting the bad apples, promoting the most incompetent, they are even collecting the worst of them. Only if you managed to completely fail a huge project you are the perfect member for the board. Only the most unsuccessful culture warriors are lining up there. perl5 is not recommended to be used in anything serious anymore. There are dozens of serious bugs and design errors not fixed, and errors and destruction being added every new release. I have no time to file all the CVE's, look at the cdelta's. 90% of the decisions are wrong. The new code of conduct is being misused to silence valid technical criticism, because perl5 is now a religion, and you may not distrust the leaders. This was literally the explanation.
    - mst 8y ago
      (rurban is the author of cperl and technically brilliant) I did, indeed, have a couple of slides in my talks where I said "if you think somebody's an asshole, you could be wrong, maybe they're actually just german" - referencing the direct german style of communication, which I personally rather like. Taking this exactly backwards and then calling it "immature racism" is ... precisely the sort of thing I was referring to, as is deriding everybody you've had technical disagreements with as "unsuccessful culture warriors". I find this a shame, but we've discussed it more than once over the years and given I haven't convinced you yet, I find it unlikely I ever will.
      - acjohnson55 8y ago
        I've met plenty of direct-talking Germans who wouldn't be mistaken for assholes.
        mst 8y ago
        Well, yes. "Some people who initially appear to be in group X may turn out to actually be in group Y" does not, at all, require that all of group Y may appear to be in group X. Logic doesn't work that way :)
      - Tomte 8y ago
        I'm German and I find that funny. It's not that I cannot be offended by stupid stereotyping and attacks on Germans (Erik Naggum had some really vile posts in that regard), but the above is not even on my top ten list of things bothering me today. Number one is cooking quinces to death, because I just wanted to blanch them a bit and forgot to turn the stove lower), so still pretty inconsequential.
        mst 8y ago
        The aggravating thing to me is it wasn't even an attack, it was part of a talk about "assholes, idiots, whiners and trolls" that basically said "none of these people are necessarily that, here's how to look at things differently and maybe end up getting on with them instead". Every other german who rendered a comment on said talk thought it was hilarious and clearly got that I sympathised due to being pretty blunt myself (oh gods east coast american middle managers, how easy they are to offend ...) My commiserations on the unplanned demise of your quinces.
mst 8y ago
perl11 exists because the perl community is full of whacky crazy people who like to shoot for the moon. Realistically, though, it's not something anybody actually writing perl5 or perl6 cares about or expects to achieve anything. Basically 'urbit with $ signs'
- jacobush 8y ago
  Yeah... I was going to say urbit is urbit with dollars signs, but they are some kind of crypto-token signs, not dollars...
z3phyr 8y ago
The natural successor of perl5 was supposed to be ruby, at least in the early 2000s. Python is nothing like perl (by design), but got adopted for the same tasks nonetheless.
- singingfish 8y ago
  > Python is nothing like perl (by design) Which is ironic because python and perl are extremely similar. I like to say that "python is perl for bureaucrats". I've been doing a bit of python for (?:recre|educ)ational purposes recently due to its superior maths libraries. I can't say I see the advantages, but that's probably just me.
  - kaens 8y ago
    > Which is ironic because python and perl are extremely similar. Would you mind expanding on this a bit? It's been a while since I did perl, but I remember it being fairly distinct from python, other than being a dynamically-typed "interpreted" language.
    - Uberphallus 8y ago
      Their type systems, object model and reflection capabilities are very alike. It's been a long while since I've developed anything serious in Perl, but the main difference I find between Python and Perl, aside from the syntax, is the value/reference split: Python makes every (passed) value a reference implicitly, Perl uses references explicitly, that can affect an architecture in important ways.
      - jacobush 8y ago
        Indeed. I managed to program Python a few years before really taking note of that difference. Couldn't understand why my data structures kept being corrupted. Ahem.
      - lizmat 8y ago
        FWIW, in Perl 6, references do not exist at the language level. At the implementation level, you could argue that everything is passed by reference. Perhaps you may find https://opensource.com/article/18/8/containers-perl-6 https://opensource.com/article/18/8/containers-perl-6 enlightning.
smueller1234 8y ago
I'm generally in agreement with everything you state. I do think, however, that with the appropriate amount of engineering, one could build an incremental JIT compiler that sped up common base idioms meaningfully while executing the whacky stuff using the old perl VM. (Ie. more like psycho, as opposited to a full reimplementation such as PyPy.) Yes, there's a while slew of things you can't do in the case - the old guts and data structures would permeate it. It would be a bit of a horrible maintenance burden. And it's generally not worth it (anymore). There's simply better options available. I played around with something like that, wow, the better part of a decade ago. The approach was to go from the OP tree back to something that had a few of the execution specifics undone such that it resembled an AST a bit more. Then find sections that could be compiled by the partial implementation and convert those. Tracing facilities were there just at a function level. We'd settled on optional type annotations using a keyword plugin that would populate a structure attached to the CV (function struct) with that information as it went through regular perl compilation. Of course, this falls short of any sort of interesting complier work. Anyway, my point is that I think it'd be doable for a sufficiently motivated and skilled (and funded) team of folks, but there's very little economic incentive to do so.
rurban 8y ago
Several misunderstandings. we are not implementing a subset of perl5, we are continuing the development of perl5, which stopped around 2002. there are much more features in cperl than in perl5. perl5 is stripping its features, because they are not able to fix the bugs. cperl on the other hand fixes them, and constantly adds new features. we don't entertain ourselves for fun, we do it for the technical necessity, because p5p is not able to, not willing, left the path to perl6 already, and broke up all cooperation. we need to fixup all the damage done by p5p, because nobody else is doing it. perl6/rakudo is nice concept but not going anywhere. the architecture is just too broken to be realistically fast enough in production. but who knowns. moar is nice. and we've seen python 3 in production, and compared to that perl6 is a godsend. cperl will not switch to a gc soon, neither will it provide proper lockless threading. simple goals first, like an object system, types, ffi, async/await, regexp, match, hashtable, inlining, jit, symbol table, ... cperl easily beats perl5 in performance, but is investing it into better security checks. it's the only language with proper Unicode support already. with the jit and the inliner it will match php7. i.e. not 20x slower, just 10x slower, which is fine. it's not a dream, it works and used in production. it is also recommended in production over perl5. rperl already matches C++ performance.
- petre 8y ago
  Can I install cperl via plenv maybe? I'd like to test out production code on it and my prime number crunching benchmark.
  - marlencrabapple 8y ago
    I'd be interested in this as well. I hadn't looked into cperl in depth until today and its starting to seem appealing after reading a few of the author's posts on reddit and the perl11 blog.
  - bmn__ 8y ago
    https://perlbrew.pl/ https://perlbrew.pl/ can do it. $ perlbrew available | grep cperl cperl-5.24.4 cperl-5.26.3 cperl-5.26.4 cperl-5.28.0 cperl-5.28.1 cperl-5.29.0 $ perlbrew version perlbrew - App::perlbrew/0.84

by btilly 8y ago

totalperspectiv 8y ago

I'm pretty sure cperl is doing exactly that though: http://perl11.org/cperl/STATUS.html http://perl11.org/cperl/STATUS.html

mst 8y ago
cperl is a trainwreck that only exists because the author forked perl5 because he was removed from the maintainance list because he couldn't stop insulting people. Don't bother pretending it'll ever be a viable project - periodically he sends patches trying to force perl5 modules to change their code because his type checking code doesn't work, then follows it up with a volley of insults when the maintainers go "huh?"
- rurban 8y ago
  cperl is not a trainwreck, only perl5 is. cperl exists because the perl5 maintainers are totally incapable of doing their job, and risking the jobs of thousands of fellow perl5 developers. Most of them already switched to something else in the last years. cperl on the other hand implemented most missing features from the last 15 years in 2-3 years, fixed the worst mistakes, and is 10-30x faster and better developed than perl5. perl5 is dead, it is not going anywhere. You had your chance, but you failed. Now the only thing you have left is doing the culture war thing, throwing around CoC accusations. Having no faith, insulting the devs. Typechecking errors? There are occasional errors because of adding more strictness and warnings from perl6 (strict names, hashpairs, ...) and some internal test and bignum modules are typed for 2x faster performance and to catch typical errors at compile-time. There's an API, and the types reflect that. The problem is that the implementations and the users don't care about the API at all, and neither about typechecks catching these errors. There are no volleys of insults to any maintainers at all. You still don't get the difference between necessary technical and professional criticism and personal attacks. In fact p5p is throwing around personal attacks and insults all the time. E.g. you are one of the main examples of immature racism in your very public YAPC talks, accusing all Germans to be Assholes (in allcaps) for years. Thought about that once? Why do you think you were not accepted as pumpkin and again the technical most incapable person was elected? p5p had their chance to do anything with the language in the last 15 years, they had a proper design and spec and sister languages doing the same. They did nothing, all attempts failed and they blocked all improvements from outside. There's no proper management, no process. Either you are committer, then you can do what you want, or not, then you may not do anything. Well, in fact there are only 4-6 bad apples at the top. The rest is doing good, but silent. But the TPM board is protecting the bad apples, promoting the most incompetent, they are even collecting the worst of them. Only if you managed to completely fail a huge project you are the perfect member for the board. Only the most unsuccessful culture warriors are lining up there. perl5 is not recommended to be used in anything serious anymore. There are dozens of serious bugs and design errors not fixed, and errors and destruction being added every new release. I have no time to file all the CVE's, look at the cdelta's. 90% of the decisions are wrong. The new code of conduct is being misused to silence valid technical criticism, because perl5 is now a religion, and you may not distrust the leaders. This was literally the explanation.
  - mst 8y ago
    (rurban is the author of cperl and technically brilliant) I did, indeed, have a couple of slides in my talks where I said "if you think somebody's an asshole, you could be wrong, maybe they're actually just german" - referencing the direct german style of communication, which I personally rather like. Taking this exactly backwards and then calling it "immature racism" is ... precisely the sort of thing I was referring to, as is deriding everybody you've had technical disagreements with as "unsuccessful culture warriors". I find this a shame, but we've discussed it more than once over the years and given I haven't convinced you yet, I find it unlikely I ever will.
    - acjohnson55 8y ago
      I've met plenty of direct-talking Germans who wouldn't be mistaken for assholes.
      - mst 8y ago
        Well, yes. "Some people who initially appear to be in group X may turn out to actually be in group Y" does not, at all, require that all of group Y may appear to be in group X. Logic doesn't work that way :)
    - Tomte 8y ago
      I'm German and I find that funny. It's not that I cannot be offended by stupid stereotyping and attacks on Germans (Erik Naggum had some really vile posts in that regard), but the above is not even on my top ten list of things bothering me today. Number one is cooking quinces to death, because I just wanted to blanch them a bit and forgot to turn the stove lower), so still pretty inconsequential.
      - mst 8y ago
        The aggravating thing to me is it wasn't even an attack, it was part of a talk about "assholes, idiots, whiners and trolls" that basically said "none of these people are necessarily that, here's how to look at things differently and maybe end up getting on with them instead". Every other german who rendered a comment on said talk thought it was hilarious and clearly got that I sympathised due to being pretty blunt myself (oh gods east coast american middle managers, how easy they are to offend ...) My commiserations on the unplanned demise of your quinces.

mst 8y ago

perl11 exists because the perl community is full of whacky crazy people who like to shoot for the moon. Realistically, though, it's not something anybody actually writing perl5 or perl6 cares about or expects to achieve anything. Basically 'urbit with $ signs'

jacobush 8y ago
Yeah... I was going to say urbit is urbit with dollars signs, but they are some kind of crypto-token signs, not dollars...

z3phyr 8y ago

The natural successor of perl5 was supposed to be ruby, at least in the early 2000s. Python is nothing like perl (by design), but got adopted for the same tasks nonetheless.

singingfish 8y ago
> Python is nothing like perl (by design) Which is ironic because python and perl are extremely similar. I like to say that "python is perl for bureaucrats". I've been doing a bit of python for (?:recre|educ)ational purposes recently due to its superior maths libraries. I can't say I see the advantages, but that's probably just me.
- kaens 8y ago
  > Which is ironic because python and perl are extremely similar. Would you mind expanding on this a bit? It's been a while since I did perl, but I remember it being fairly distinct from python, other than being a dynamically-typed "interpreted" language.
  - Uberphallus 8y ago
    Their type systems, object model and reflection capabilities are very alike. It's been a long while since I've developed anything serious in Perl, but the main difference I find between Python and Perl, aside from the syntax, is the value/reference split: Python makes every (passed) value a reference implicitly, Perl uses references explicitly, that can affect an architecture in important ways.
    - jacobush 8y ago
      Indeed. I managed to program Python a few years before really taking note of that difference. Couldn't understand why my data structures kept being corrupted. Ahem.
    - lizmat 8y ago
      FWIW, in Perl 6, references do not exist at the language level. At the implementation level, you could argue that everything is passed by reference. Perhaps you may find https://opensource.com/article/18/8/containers-perl-6 https://opensource.com/article/18/8/containers-perl-6 enlightning.

smueller1234 8y ago

I'm generally in agreement with everything you state. I do think, however, that with the appropriate amount of engineering, one could build an incremental JIT compiler that sped up common base idioms meaningfully while executing the whacky stuff using the old perl VM. (Ie. more like psycho, as opposited to a full reimplementation such as PyPy.) Yes, there's a while slew of things you can't do in the case - the old guts and data structures would permeate it. It would be a bit of a horrible maintenance burden. And it's generally not worth it (anymore). There's simply better options available. I played around with something like that, wow, the better part of a decade ago. The approach was to go from the OP tree back to something that had a few of the execution specifics undone such that it resembled an AST a bit more. Then find sections that could be compiled by the partial implementation and convert those. Tracing facilities were there just at a function level. We'd settled on optional type annotations using a keyword plugin that would populate a structure attached to the CV (function struct) with that information as it went through regular perl compilation. Of course, this falls short of any sort of interesting complier work. Anyway, my point is that I think it'd be doable for a sufficiently motivated and skilled (and funded) team of folks, but there's very little economic incentive to do so.

rurban 8y ago

Several misunderstandings. we are not implementing a subset of perl5, we are continuing the development of perl5, which stopped around 2002. there are much more features in cperl than in perl5. perl5 is stripping its features, because they are not able to fix the bugs. cperl on the other hand fixes them, and constantly adds new features. we don't entertain ourselves for fun, we do it for the technical necessity, because p5p is not able to, not willing, left the path to perl6 already, and broke up all cooperation. we need to fixup all the damage done by p5p, because nobody else is doing it. perl6/rakudo is nice concept but not going anywhere. the architecture is just too broken to be realistically fast enough in production. but who knowns. moar is nice. and we've seen python 3 in production, and compared to that perl6 is a godsend. cperl will not switch to a gc soon, neither will it provide proper lockless threading. simple goals first, like an object system, types, ffi, async/await, regexp, match, hashtable, inlining, jit, symbol table, ... cperl easily beats perl5 in performance, but is investing it into better security checks. it's the only language with proper Unicode support already. with the jit and the inliner it will match php7. i.e. not 20x slower, just 10x slower, which is fine. it's not a dream, it works and used in production. it is also recommended in production over perl5. rperl already matches C++ performance.

petre 8y ago
Can I install cperl via plenv maybe? I'd like to test out production code on it and my prime number crunching benchmark.
- marlencrabapple 8y ago
  I'd be interested in this as well. I hadn't looked into cperl in depth until today and its starting to seem appealing after reading a few of the author's posts on reddit and the perl11 blog.
- bmn__ 8y ago
  https://perlbrew.pl/ https://perlbrew.pl/ can do it. $ perlbrew available | grep cperl cperl-5.24.4 cperl-5.26.3 cperl-5.26.4 cperl-5.28.0 cperl-5.28.1 cperl-5.29.0 $ perlbrew version perlbrew - App::perlbrew/0.84