Also I don't know why we would want to downgrade to LLVM.

That wasn't the point of my post, but it was also exactly the point of my post, so I'm not sure why we're having a discussion on how Raku will someday eventually be faster than Perl, because that's irrelevant to my point that the semantic mismatch between a language and its implementation is really, really important to performance.

The main reason grammars are slow is because basically no one has touched the slow parts of it for the better part of a decade.

I remember profiling and optimizing grammars in an earlier version a little over a decade ago, so.

It has absolutely nothing to do with being able to replace what whitespace matches.

I don't believe this, because:

• Like I said, I spent a lot of time looking at this.
• Doing nothing is faster than doing something. A JIT is not magic fairy dust that makes everything faster. Even if you can get this codepath down to where you can JIT across a monomorphic call site, the resulting code is still not faster than a single inlined lexeme, especially if you account for the time and memory overhead of JITting at all. The semantic mismatch between a language and its implementation is really really important to performance.

Really if Perl doesn't do something drastic, in five to ten years I would suspect that Raku would just plain be faster in every aspect.

I've heard this every year for the past 10 years, but I respect that you're not promising it in the next year, like Raiph always used to. I'll believe it when I see it.