> I'd be interested to see what features there are that
    > make the system slower in general, even when they
    > aren't being used. I did a lot of work in my PhD on
    > making odd features not affect the performance of
    > Ruby code when they aren't being used.

I suspect you would be warmly welcomed, and meet many interesting people, in the Perl6 IRC channel, especially if you lead to a link to your PhD.

My main guesses:

* multiple dispatch * the meta-object protocol

And the thing is, these features are being used all the time, because the core language is built out of them. If you want to see how a language which is not built on these things runs (on the same vm implementation, I might add), I suggest you try nqp :-).

https://github.com/nqp/nqp

Don't forget about the grammar engine - the parsing speed is only in the hundreds as measured in lines of code/s, which is a concern for script startup.

I've come up with rather 'creative' workarounds[1] until a more proper solution arrives...

[1] https://github.com/cygx/6make/blob/master/6make

He does call it a "compiler" in the video. Maybe that's temporary while it's still unoptimized, or a change in direction?

Perl5 historically has compiled to bytecode and then interpreted the bytecode. I imagine that's what's going on here.

If you click the green Start... button at this page: https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/perl6?nick=chris... (change the nick if you want) you'll join the real time chat room (IRC) dedicated to developing Perl 6. (Here's today's log if you want to look first: http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/today

You can type 'hi', ask folk to read your above comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10565204 ), and then seen what unfolds when you chat for a few minutes. :)

Not directly, sadly. I can make an educated guess though, since Perl 5 has since adopted many of the features thought up for Perl 6. Particularly try looking at its OO features, in regards to roles, parametrized roles, reflection and automated attribute/constructor creation. I can't say with confidence, but i suspect the number of languages having all those features is very low, if existent, and the number of languages with some of these features is also low.

Do note that you will have to look closely and follow references to make sure you have a full picture of understanding, since at first glance many of them seem simple, but turn out to offer considerable depth.

http://doc.perl6.org/language/objects

I'm not sure if Perl 5 has adopted these features, but these features have been implemented in Perl 5 via modules [0], which is excellent - but sadly, this is vastly different than being in core, or even having the modules in core. I don't even think you can set default attributes in Perl 5 methods. You still have to pass around the object, shift it off - a whole lot of boilerplate. Something as simple as that has been proposed, but it's not been in production for Perl 5. (without Moose and friends, of course)

Really, there hasn't been a terrible amount of new features in Perl 5 - and certainly not a new model for OO. Moose is great! And the constant release of CPAN modules is also wonderful, but the core of Perl 5 is full of dragons, which makes backporting features from Perl 6 hard to do in core - and perhaps a good argument can be made against doing that. Example: Moose is a very successful project, but thee given/when statement in the core of Perl was a failure.

[0] http://moose.iinteractive.com/en/

I could write a lot to explain it, but at the end of the day, unless you can accept the following it is not worth the effort.

CPAN is the language, perl is just the VM.