This will probably impact quite a few people, so I thought I'll explain
myself here :)
As of now, panda will not precompile Perl 6 code anymore. This will
introduce unexpected slowness, for instance HTTP::UserAgent now takes
5.4 seconds to load instead of 0.8 on my machine.
It may now sound like a very bad idea, but I think it's necessary. Panda
was never doing precompilation very well, and maintaining it as both
module manager and a precompilation manager was a massive PITA. It's
been long agreed that precompiled modules are a cache
that should be managed by rakudo itself, just nobody got around to
implementing it yet :)
Hopefully now that everything in the wild will be slow it will raise
some awareness of the issue and make someone sit down to it and make it
happen. Possibly myself.
It may be desired and/or tempting to take the old precompilation logic
from panda git history
and implement it as an external tool, thus bringing us to the state we
were in before, just with two tools instead of one. Maybe it's not a bad
idea, it will surely make life of the end-users a lot less painful, but
it will still make it seem like the problem is solved and there are more
pressing matters to attend to before christmas. I don't want that to
happen, so I'm putting my mixed feelings aside and I won't make it
happen myself, in the name of raising awareness of the problem.
I hope this won't ruin your development flow too much, but as a certain
short king^Wprince once said, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make :)
Hope you have a wonderful day.
xoxo,
tadzik
