Developer Creates An Experimental Perl 5 To Java Compiler (perl.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Saturday night saw the announcement of an experimental Perl 5 to Java compiler. "This is the first release," posted developer FlÃvio S. Glock -- after 100 weeks of development. "Note that you don't need to compile a Java file. Perlito5 now compiles the Perl code to JVM bytecode in memory and executes it." He describes the compiler as "a work-in-progress" that "provides an impressive coverage of Perl features, but it will not run most existing Perl programs due to platform differences."

Comments

Dev deserves nerdly kudos - however

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'm not sure if there's a practical point to this. Perl is going to be at least as widely supported as Java, so it's not a question of availability. And the dev makes no claims regarding speed... actually the dev makes no claims whatsoever, other than "here it is" and "most perl scripts won't work". If speed were actually the goal, I don't think Java byte code would be the target.

From the standpoint of being a cool nerd project, though - most definitely. This does seem like a throwback to the "news for nerds" catch phrase.

Re:Why?

[skids]

Probably merging projects in different laguages on the JVM. Also if you are sandboxed to just the JVM, running Perl5 without hitting metal is neat. I dunno for sure, but this could conceivably play a part in helping Perl6's Inline::Perl5 perform on rakudo-jvm.