A few days ago I read Features Perl 5 Needs in 2012 by chromatic and while I thought the ideas were nice the only one I really cared about was a replacement for XS. I have tried with XS and FFI to bring in new libraries and it is just so painful. Marcus believes that Perl garbage collection needs a serious overhaul and I agree. Improved gc in a language is one of those things that helps ease development pain, specifically scalability issues. Java is always improving its gc to better meet new performance requirements. Structured core exceptions is another improvement that would be very nice. This got me thinking what would I like to see in the next version of Perl. I have never contributed to Perl core, never written a Perl book, and I do not follow p5p or Perl6 development. I have looked a little at the Perl source but nothing serious. This makes me an outsider to Perl development so I have a different viewpoint on what I should get out of Perl.

The number one thing Perl needs is speed. It needs to be faster to stay competitive. This is one of the reasons that people say Perl is dead, no news about large scale performance improvements. The python community has PyPy and Psycho as performance options. Facebook developed HipHop for PHP which gives a 3-5x speed boost with software like Drupal. The Perl community has B::C which can improve program startup time and B::CC which may improve runtime speeds. Reini Urban has covered this material on both the Perl 5 and Perl 6 front.

Now I don't want to get off on a rant here ;)

I read articles like Perl 5.16 and beyond and the whole focus is new syntactic sugar and how adding a MOP to Perl which will make Moose faster. The only mention of something becoming faster is by adding all new features to Perl and that only makes certain things faster. What about the rest of us? I try to keep up the good tenets of functional programming in my applications and I have never had the need to use Moose in an application. I have literally dozens of Perl programs on my computer that I use in a day to day fashion some I wrote, some I didn't and none of them use Moose, Mouse, Moo, etc.. I want improvements to Perl that make my existing applications faster.

C was initially developed between 1969 and 1973, making it 40 years old. Java 1 was released at the beginning of 1996 making it 16 years old. Perl was first released in 1987 making it 25 years old. GCC and clang for C and the Oracle JVM get faster. If you take newer versions and test against older versions with the same code there is a trend for the newer compilers and JVM to have much better performance. The same cannot be said for Perl. Perl::Formance is an ongoing project that tracks the performance of Perl versions against different benchmark programs. The general trend is Perl performance is a plateau and gets slightly worse in some cases.

This performance and optimization stagnation Perl is in does nothing to help expand its market share and improve its image. The reality we all already know is that there is a finite amount of programmers in the world and Perl is vying for position against the constant influx of new languages as well as competing against existing languages. Some may consider the community staying the same size a good thing but my point of view on the matter is the community is either growing or dying. CPAN may seem magical to some but it is just a group of developers who choose to build libraries in and for Perl. For CPAN to stay vibrant it needs to add modules that meet the ever expanding needs of the programming world. An example of an under represented segment is graph database support. The PHP and Java community have us beat bad in those areas. Why? One of the reasons is both those languages have tools that allow them to scale far beyond the base implementation which is an important scalability concern.

I can take a PHP application that is slower than its Perl equivalent, and without changing the code compile it with HipHop and now it is faster than the Perl version. Does this work the same with B::C or B::CC? No. This is the end of my rant.

The top features I want to see in Perl:

1. A faster perl across the board

2. Better gc which would probably make applications faster

3. XS, FFI improvements to allow faster support of new libraries in the wild

Everything else for me is unimportant. People still use C because it is fast not because they are constantly adding new features to the language. On a side note I just saw a tweet from chromatic stating he has an idea of how to do better exceptions in core and stay backwards compatible.