Ian Hague Perl 6 Grant Application: JavaScript backend for Rakudo

Category: Grants

Comments (12)


+1.


+1 browser-side Perl 6 would provide huge boost to the language.


+1, pmurias is the perfect fit for this task.


+1, pmurias is the best choice for this grant to success.


This would be awesome


+1 I think that would be a great boost to the language and I am eager to reimplement my frontends with perl6.


+1: pmurias has already been working on the JS backend for NQP for quite some time, and has *greatly* expanded the NQP test suite as he did so. He's got a proven track record and is by far the best choice for this grant -- and having full Rakudo working on both node.js and Chrome would be a huge win.


Perl 6 needs this (and more like this) to show the world how awesome it is (it already is, and this will make it even more awesome). So, please:
+1


+1: I am so psyched about this that I will make an additional (small :) ) donation to TPF if it goes forward! This will open us up to some very interesting experiments.


I think node's strength is the ability for frontend devs to code backends, without a need to learn a new language.

This project will create a niche for the Perl 6 language to become one that can be used in the backend as well as the frontend, possibly increasing its adoption.

One point of concern, however, is performance. There are plenty of human-written JavaScript web apps that slow the browser to a crawl. Working off the assumption that compiler-generated JavaScript won't as be performant as human-written one, I have a worry this project will never see wide adoption due to dismal performance.

The monetary amount requested, however, is very small for the amount of work to be done, so my vote on this is +0.4


I'm unable to predict with a lot of certainty how fast the performance of Perl 6 compiled to JavaScript will be after the completion of this grant.

The current JavaScript implementations are fairly complex JITs so it's really hard to predict how they will handle the way some of the more tricky Perl 6 features will be compiled.

What I hope to achieve with the grant is to allow the community to explore what having Perl 6 in the browser (and other places where JavaScript is barging in) will allow us too do. For a lot of the more demanding uses no doubt a ton of work will still be required.

In the long term the performance of the code produced by dart2js (which according to some benchmarks seems to approach native JavaScript) gives us hope that given enough effort we might be able to achieve really good performance.
To be fair Dart is not Perl 6 but it still has significantly different semantics from JavaScript.
A lot of the trick dart2js seem potentially very helpful to us.


+1.


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