What is Production Ready?

“When will Perl 6 be production ready?” – they ask from time to time. I know the feeling, there was a time I wanted to know too, and after a year working on Rakudo, I can truly say,

I have no freaking idea!

I’d really like to tell you, seriously. If you ask #perl6, they will start tricking you into thinking that it’s ready enough and they’re actually using it, right? Tricky bastards. But, what do you actually ask for? What is this mighty Production Ready?

I dedicated some thinking to this today. What makes something Production Ready? I can think of two possibilities

1. The creators declare it Production Ready
2. People start using it in Production Environment

The first one is a bit tricky to achieve when it comes to Perl 6. As we know, Perl 6 is a language. How can language be Production Ready? Think, think. Is there another example of something which is rather a spec than an end-user product, and is either not declared as finished, or the spec freeze date is ridiculously far in the future? Right, it’s HTML5. Spec is a draft, it’s nowhere near finished, and neither of the implementation implement all of it. So what makes HTML5 production-ready? I don’t think it’s declared ready by its creators. It’s that people didn’t bother with official opinions and started actually solving problems with it. Took the existing implementations and made use of it. Therefore, we can safely assume that by “Production Ready Perl 6” we really mean “A Perl 6 Compiler I can use to get the job done”. So what are the current compilers lacking for the majority of people?

Yes, I’m asking you. You don’t really know, do you? You didn’t even try them? It’s just that people don’t use them too often, so they’re probably crap, right? Ok, there’s some logic in that.

There is a possibility that Perl 6 is already capable of solving your problems. You should try it. But! Enough of the advertising business, I’m wondering here.

“So what is your Production Ready?”, you may ask. What do I expect from Perl 6 before it will be Production Ready for me? It’s not, I’m not gonna lie. It’s solving my problems, it pays my bills, but it lacks this Something that will make it Purely Awesome. In my opinion, there are two major things we’re missing:

1. Speed. Not all things I write need to be blazingly fast, but what is the point of amazingly expressive language, if the bottleneck of the development process is program runtime?
2. Access to Perl 5 modules from CPAN. Yes, I know of modules.perl6.org fairly well, believe me. Still, it will take ages, if not infinity to make it as awesome as CPAN is. Blizkost is a bridge between Perl 5 and Parrot and it’s capable of running simple stuff already.

That’s it. I can live without most of the things. But what I’m really looking for, is a better Perl 5. It needs CPAN, and it needs to be less slow that it is. I’m not looking for a C performance. I could live with Perl 5 performance here probably.

That’s what I’m missing. And what is Your Production Ready?