[vvillena]

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.

[cutler]

That's assuming it can be made fast. It's been stagnant around this level of performance for quite some time now.

[lizmat]

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.

The Perl Foundation recently approved another grant for the JIT: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2018/11/september-2018-grant-... about http://news.perlfoundation.org/2018/10/grant-proposal-moarvm...

[cutler]

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.

[lizmat]

Well volunteered!