No particular "killer app" has emerged for Raku as
of yet, there's no task that's going to make you go
"Aha, this is a job for Raku!". But you know, it's
not as though the original perl was designed to be
the Web 1.0 server-side scripting language or the
saviour of the human genome project...
That said there are a number of features of Raku
that are attractive and might turn out to be
critically useful... you mention what I like to
call the CAP features (Concurrency, Asyncrony and
Parallelism) and you're certainly correct that
languages like Go are used more frequently in that
space, but the Raku version of equivalent Go code
tends to be quite a bit tighter and arguably easier
to follow. I would imagine that Go is a typically
a performance win over Raku, but the ease of
writing correct code matters too, and I expect there's
still room for performance optimization with Raku.
Another virtue of Raku is it's regular expressions
have been re-thought and redesigned (it's one of
the few languages that doesn't care about having
"perl compliant" regexs), and in addition to that
there are additional grammar features included,
making it a good choice for hacking special-purpose
parsers.
There's some improvements included in core for very
basic things like handling numerics-- very large
integers mostly Just Work, there's support for true
rational numbers (less worries floating point
aproximations are going to throw you a curve), and
so on.
Comparing Raku to Perl, there are a number of small
improvements I find very convenient (some Raku
fans say the reason they like it is "the little
things"), e.g. if you want to loop over an array
handling *three* elements at a time, this works:
for @items -> $alpha, $beta, $gamma {
say "first: $alpha, second: $beta, third: $gamma";
}
On 6/14/20, Radhakrishnan Venkataraman <weor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I had been a perl 5.0 user in the past. Ever since perl 6.0 was announced,
> I waited, like many, indefinitely. At last perl 6.0 has just started from
> its starting block and is also in the race. I am happy about that.
>
> Perl 5.0 was generally termed to be good at CGI scripting, system
> administration, web scraping, strong regex, processing text files etc.,
>
> I want to know what perl 6 is so special in. When perl 5.0 was there,
> there did not exist any other language to do the same things easily as perl
> 5.0 did. Similarly, in which areas perl 6 is special? I am unable to know
> it from google search, as much information is not available.
>
> Further, if concurrency and parallelism are the special things in perl 6,
> then Rust and Go (so special in both concurrency and parallelism) are
> already spreading its wings over the information technology field. Both
> are statically typed and compiled languages and there would be more
> "welcome gesture" for these languages in the field.
>
> To put my question simply, where is the space for perl 6 in today's
> technology?
> Please enlighten me (any body from user group) on this.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Regards,
> Radhakrishnan
>
