At YAPC::NA 2014 I talked about FFI and Perl. FFI is an alternative to XS that I think is worthy of consideration. My talk was well attended, I think primarily because I jokingly subtitled my talk "Never Need To Write XS Again". So there is a market for this idea. I mostly talked about FFI::Raw, which was a great way to experiment with FFI and to write real live CPAN modules with FFI right then and there. The question of performance inevitably came up, so at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop last year I talked about that.

Essentially I think the performance gains you get from a well t…