Perl 6 performance update

Jonathan Worthington — 45 minutes 🦋

A look at the performance of the Rakudo/MoarVM implementation of Perl 6 today, considering how various language features perform, explaining some of the key optimizations that take place, and looking at the challenges and opportunities ahead.

At the time of the initial release of the Perl 6 specification, its leading implementation - Rakudo running atop of MoarVM - was not exactly speedy. Following the "make it work, then make it fast" principle, the focus had been decidedly on the first step.

Thankfully, since then, lots of effort has been put into performance, and today things are significantly better. In this talk, I'll take a look at a range of the key optimizations that have enabled this improvement, and share some performance results.

I'll also spend some time discussing the consequences of the kinds of optimizations that are performed, what kinds of changes tend to help Perl 6 programs go faster, and what kinds of changes that you might consider making that are in reality unlikely to have an impact.

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