Not to be trollish, but is anyone actually using Perl 6 for more than just for kicks? It is a super interesting language, but has it been battle tested over the years similar to Perl 5?
We are using in in production. One of our bigger uses is a DB metrics aggregator. We use it to to pull stats from DB servers for remote clients and dump them into graphite. Sort of an agent-less monitoring platform. We've had this Perl 6 tool running 24/7 since last summer. It's now pulling from ~80 DB servers.
Another internal use is an AWS infrastructure management tool that we built. A cli util that handles the initial bootstrapping for new AWS projects and a few helper features to simplify some of our common management tasks.
Perl 6 has been pretty easy to work with. Even in situations where a module isn't available or the requirements are too complex to build it with Perl 6 within our project time constraints, its facilities as a glue language really make it simple to work with external tools, modules, libs.
If you like the Perl 6 syntax then I'd recommend just spending some time with it. It's stable and fast enough for regular use now.
Perl 6 is still 9 times slower than Perl 5 when parsing log files with a regex. I don't quite get why the feature which made Perl famous has now taken a back seat. Why should I take a 9x performance hit?
The Perl 5 core is hack upon hack, to the point that it's been mostly abandoned due to how hard is to change things without breaking anything. Perl 6 was born as a specification, which allows for a "first make it right, then make it fast" approach.
Unfortunately, the performance of regexes has not been improved much in the past years, that is true and on the radar. Yes, it can be improved (very much indeed).
Most other subsystems of Rakudo Perl 6 have been improved significantly, some by orders of magnitude. And then there's work on the basic runtime of MoarVM and its JIT that will benefit all programs running on MoarVM.
Perl with poorly-performing regexes is beta software, as far as I'm concerned. Why OOP, junctions and all the less relevant stuff has taken priority over regexes baffles me.
Another internal use is an AWS infrastructure management tool that we built. A cli util that handles the initial bootstrapping for new AWS projects and a few helper features to simplify some of our common management tasks.
Perl 6 has been pretty easy to work with. Even in situations where a module isn't available or the requirements are too complex to build it with Perl 6 within our project time constraints, its facilities as a glue language really make it simple to work with external tools, modules, libs.
If you like the Perl 6 syntax then I'd recommend just spending some time with it. It's stable and fast enough for regular use now.