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.
Do you know what they are?
> 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.
* 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 :-).
I've come up with rather 'creative' workarounds[1] until a more proper solution arrives...
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. :)
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.
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.
CPAN is the language, perl is just the VM.