> Raku seems to be stuck in a "we'll optimize that later" dead-end … Raku has a long way to go.
I agree that Raku still has a long way to go in terms of performance – it's not nearly as fast as it has the potential to be.
That said, I strongly disagree that Raku's performance is stuck. I've only been using Raku for about a year, but even in that time I've seen a noticeable improvement. Over a longer period, Raku has gotten dramatically faster – around a 10× improvement from the 1.0 Christmas release, depending on how you measure. For details, check out this 2019 talk where one of the lead Raku developers discusses performance gains/plans. ([0] video; [1] slides)
There's definitely still work to do (especially with regexes and grammars, as you mention). But the language has made tremendous progress, and is now in the same basic range as Python/Ruby/Perl.
I agree that Raku still has a long way to go in terms of performance – it's not nearly as fast as it has the potential to be.
That said, I strongly disagree that Raku's performance is stuck. I've only been using Raku for about a year, but even in that time I've seen a noticeable improvement. Over a longer period, Raku has gotten dramatically faster – around a 10× improvement from the 1.0 Christmas release, depending on how you measure. For details, check out this 2019 talk where one of the lead Raku developers discusses performance gains/plans. ([0] video; [1] slides)
There's definitely still work to do (especially with regexes and grammars, as you mention). But the language has made tremendous progress, and is now in the same basic range as Python/Ruby/Perl.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNeu0wK92NE [1]: https://www.jnthn.net/papers/2019-perlcon-performance.pdf