Perl 6 to machine code via Common Lisp and sbcl

avar on 2007-09-23T00:23:52

Aankhen, fglock and me have recently been working on a Common Lisp emitter for KindaPerl6. KindaPerl6 is a self-compiling compiler written in a subset of Perl 6 with support for multiple emitter backends. Up until now it has been running on the Perl 5 backend but now the Common Lisp backend is getting up to speed.

Hello world is about the only thing the CL backend is currently compiling, but it's doing so quite impressively already. I've posted an update to a recent thread on pugs.blogs.com that shows how fast Perl 6 to machine code via sbcl is doing compared to the kp6 perl5 backend and the parrot nqp compiler.

Common Lisp has other implementations you could do some interesting stuff with, for instance you could run the same program under movitz "on the metal". If someone wanted to implement an operating system in Perl now would be a good time to start:)