On Fri, Dec 22, 2000 at 03:56:06PM -0500, Deven T. Corzine wrote:
> Except for obvious performance-critical bottleneck areas, what advantages
> are there to implementing anything else first in C?
One reason (maybe not a good one) I can think of
There are people who already have experience of writing perl in C.
I don't think there's anyone with experience of writing a perl interpreter
in perl.
Not sure if that's a circular argument.
People with experience of the innards of perl5 already know how how not
to do some things for perl implemented in C. :-)
Implementing perl in perl wouldn't give us this headstart. However,
headstarts do not necessarily win races.
I'm also not totally sure how to bootstrap perl in perl. I have a C
compiler that works, a perl interpreter that works, but I don't have total
confidence in perl5's perl compiler. It might take quite a lot of perl5
messy guts hacking to make perl5's compiler good enough to bootstrap a
clean perl6 compiler to compile the perl systems to a binary.
Nicholas Clark
