In contrast, as I understand it, RPerl is basically C++ in Perl
clothing. It
has different levels of support depending on how you write your
Perl. If you
write "low magic Perl" which basically cuts out 50% of the
language, and also
add a lot of type annotations resembling C++ or hardware-level
types, then your
code can be transpiled to C++ and run as fast as a C++ program,
which is orders
of magnitude eg 100X faster than the Perl otherwise would be.
Correct me if I'm wrong (I very well might be), but RPerl really
doesn't let you do much of anything, does it? Last I've heard, for
example, you couldn't even read from a database, making it pretty
useless to just about anyone doing serious work.
Well, lots of useful functionality including reading from a database
ALSO can't be done by the language itself with regular Perl or C++
either, and instead is enabled by other code used WITH the language. So
in that sense, RPerl is at the same level.
I was speaking more to the core language as I understand it rather than
the whole ecosystem.
So RPerl is not a replacement for the whole Perl ecosystem, but rather
is its own language that is inspired by Perl and C++ bringing a kind of
hybrid of both, and which lacks a comprehensive mature ecosystem, so
what you can do with it is more limited to problem spaces that can be
solved using a core language, like algorithm type problems.
I've also asked if any companies use it, but I've received no
response. I don't think it's used anywhere. I've heard of one project
where someone was hired to see if they could make RPerl useful for a
company, but failed.
RPerl looks to me an awful lot like a beginning comp-sci transpiler
project that got out of control. I also understand that RPerl doesn't
let you use most of C++, either. So you have a crippled subset of
Perl—with a bunch of werid annotations layered on top—being used as a
scripting language to write a crippled subset of C++. I can't
understand why anyone would find that compelling.
If, however, it could do everything Perl (or C++) could do, it might
be worth looking into. I would love to see /any/ evidence that it's
useful for business.
I'm not going to argue that RPerl is actually useful as is for most
business cases that currently are handled by either Perl or C++. I was
just trying to answer the asked question on how "standard" Perl and
RPerl compared.
My bottom line in my original response still stands, that "standard" and
RPerl are very different from each other, and do not just have small
differences.
-- Darren Duncan
Thank you both for the discussion. :-)
(concurrent, distributed).