[dasil003]

I've never been a real Perl hacker, more of an admirer from afar. I mention that because I'm pretty close to the ideal "objective observer" that chromatic mentions.

dskoll certainly has valid concerns, but he turns into a real asshole as the thread continues:

I believe the improvements in speed and memory required to make Perl 6 competitive with Perl 5 are unprecedented in the history of computer science.

This is a ridiculous statement, of course things have been optimized by 95% before. Given the specific explanations given by the devs about the wholly unoptimized state of the project along with planned optimizations, it seems well within the realm of possibility.

I'm not sure what the chip on this guys shoulder is, but it sounds like he just wants perl5. He gives no consideration for the innovation and creativity behind perl6. If he doesn't give a shit about all the advanced features then stick with perl5 for god's sake, it's well proven and it's not going anywhere. But to argue ad nauseam about the impossibility of an "adequate" optimization from a totally ignorant position is pretty offensive.

[Dunbar]

The one thing I've learned in the years I've worked with Perl is to never underestimate the ability of the Perl community to achieve the incredible.

To compare the performance of the mature, optimized Perl 5 core to the freshly baked, feature rich Perl 6 is shortsighted in the extreme.

The Perl 5 runtime is hard to extend, meaning that using the modern additions to the language (notably Moose), comes with a significant start up penalty. This can not be easily overcome.

Perl 6 has a Grammar, Perl 5 only has an implementation (only perl5 can parse Perl5). There is a lot of opportunity for making Perl 6 nice and fast, certainly fast enough for the larger complex applications it is designed to support.

Perl 6 is not trying to compete with Perl 5 on one line throw away scripts. Not yet anyway.

[draegtun]

Yes I don't know if the OP is being deliberately unaware just to cause a fuss but he/she doesn't seem to understand the difference between Parrot (VM), Rakudo (Perl6 implementation on Parrot) & Perl6 (the spec).