Another day another generic text processing problem that many developers have had to solve before. I have a list of patterns and need to find if they exist in a group of files. If I did not need to do complex post processing then I could just use the command line like so


grep -ri -f patterns files/


A few days ago I read Features Perl 5 Needs in 2012 by chromatic and while I thought the ideas were nice the only one I really cared about was a replacement for XS. I have tried with XS and FFI to bring in new libraries and it is just so painful. Marcus believes that Perl garbage collection needs a serious overhaul and I agree. Improved gc in a language is one of those things that helps ease development pain, specifically scalability issues. Java is always improving its gc to better meet new performance requirements. Structured core exceptions is another improvement that would be very nice. This got me thinking what would I like to see in the next version of Perl. I have never contributed to Perl core, never written a Perl book, and I do not follow p5p or Perl6 development. I have looked a little at the Perl source but nothing serious. This makes me an outsider to Perl development so I have a different viewpoint on what I should get out of Perl.