Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Perl 5's killer app is CPAN. It will be a looooong time before Perl 6 can compete.

I'm contributing toward language integration bindings, hoping to make it convenient and socially acceptable to call out to Perl 5, Python, Ruby, ... so that we will have (a subset of) CPAN, pypy, Rubygems, and so on. You can do this from any language really -- it is just binding to the c lib of the guest language.

It kinda makes me sad that the instinct for most of these things is to port a lib from language to language to language... when does it end?! I never want anyone to write pyplot again -- let's just call pyplot from ALL the languages thanks to the magic that is a little c library called libpython.

You seem to be under the impression that Perl 6 can't use Perl 5 CPAN modules.

https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5

What advantage does running Perl 5 code in the Perl 6 runtime give you? Is it enough to warrant switching?

Depending on how you look at it, the advantage is either all of the Perl 5 ecosystem plus whatever Perl 6 brings to the table, or the lack of a disadvantage through not having a large module ecosystem, depending on how charitable you want to be.

Not to mention, you also have Inline::Python[1], and conceivably any other runtimes they want to embed. I think it would be interesting to see what you get by taking the best of class in each ecosystem and using them. It may or may not scale well due to data marshalling, but it's definitely something new (at least the ease of it is) and, IMO, worth looking into.

1: https://github.com/niner/Inline-Python/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com