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epoch1970

When will a traditional interpreter written in C and running just about everywhere be available for Perl 6?

All of the successful scripting languages have one: Perl 5 and earlier, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Lua, PHP, and even UNIX shell scripts.

Yet when it comes to Perl 6, we just don't see that.

The Perl 6 community has spun its wheels time and time and time again with half-baked interpreters written in an obscure language like Haskell, or written in Perl 6 itself using half-baked Perl 6 to 5 converters, or targeting the .NET CLR or JVM, or targeting very obscure and limited VMs like Parrot or MoarVM.

It's no wonder that Perl 6 hasn't really gone anywhere after 15 years. They've done everything but the one thing they should be doing if they want success: implementing a traditional interpreter using C that runs just about everywhere!

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I don't quite get your point. MoarVM was created specifically for Perl 6, it is written in C and just works. JVM support in Rakudo is just added bonus and you are free to ignore it (like most users do).

For 99% users "Perl 6" will mean just "Rakudo + MoarVM" which seems to be exactly what you're asking for.

Note that MoarVM is nothing like Parrot. Parrot was a failed project which intended to bring universal VM for all dynamic languages. Obviously, too wide project scope resulted in broken and unmaintainable implementation.

MoarVM is made just for Perl 6 and intends to avoid repeating its predecessor's mistakes.

I'd like to use Perl 6, but after 15 years of waiting there still isn't an implementation ready for production use.

Rakudo and MoarVM clearly aren't what we, as potential Perl 6 developers and users, want.

They look far too similar to the many other similar Perl 6 failures we've seen.

How are we to trust that Rakudo won't go the way of Pugs, or that MoarVM won't go the way of Parrot, leaving us in a lurch?

Even if they do remain viable, we don't want to have to deal with separate VMs, regardless of whether they're specific to Perl 6 or not.

We don't want to deal with the bugs and compatibility issues that invariably pop up when dealing with separate compilers and VMs.

Like I said, we want the Perl 5, Ruby, Python, Lua, and Tcl type of experience.

We want there to be one consistent implementation that's widely used and trusted.

We want something proven and familiar.

Unfortunately, we aren't getting that with Rakudo and MoarVM, nor from the many other unsuccessful attempts in the past.

Maybe you should do a little research? Rakudo is backed by the Perl foundation. It's not going away and neither is the MoarVM.

Rakudo + MoarVM is going to be "it" going forward I would think. I guess we'll wait and see. That doesn't mean that other compilers won't come along because that is one of the benefits of Perl 6. All the languages you mention have different versions out there. The only one that doesn't is Perl 5 and that's because only Perl can parse Perl. That's going away with Perl 6 and that's good. Rakudo+MoarVM is great. It still leaves the door open for genius to shine.

Rakudo + MoarVM is exactly what potential Perl 6 developers want. Everything else is just gravy.

I have no idea if Perl 6 will "take off". I hope it gains traction. Watching Larry Wall got me interested enough to install it and start learning it anyway.

Yes "we" want. And "we" don't understand what is e.g. this about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Python_software#Python...

That's a perfect example of a much better approach, exactly like I was talking about earlier.

There's CPython, the main Python interpreter. It's quite traditional in architecture, and is written in a very portable subset of C.

It's the Python implementation that pretty much all Python developers and users happily and successfully use.

Then there are the experimental or niche Python implementations. They augment very specific and isolated use cases, instead of splintering and delaying the adoption of the language like the many failed partial Perl 6 implementations did.

It should be evident that the Python approach is better than the Perl approach. We've been able to use Python 3 in production for many years now, while Perl 6 still isn't usable.

... instead of splintering and delaying the adoption of the language like the many failed partial Perl 6 implementations did.

I'm historian of Perl 6, a bit :-). http://www.slideshare.net/michaljurosz1/perl-family-15-years...

Open source, volunteers, real life, ecosystem, not easy to implement so feature rich language, ... this wasn't planned.

I would almost think that what you like in Python is now available for Perl 6 (plus loads more!):

You've got MoarVM, which is just like CPython But if you want a different backend - great! Don't have to wait for MoarVM - the folks at MoarVM didn't wait for Parrot to solve their problems (or they'd still be waiting). For example, use JVM, just like Jython.

This is a stark difference to the situation of Perl 5, where there is only one interpreter, and there's little, if any chance of another. There's no Perl 5 language specification (as there is in Perl 6), except the Perl 5 interpreter. Only Perl 5 can parse Perl 5.

Perl 6 got so many things right, it's phenomenal.

Getting things right takes time, and it only happened because so many things went wrong.

It doesn't matter how many things Perl 6 got right when they got the most important thing completely wrong: the availability of a usable and reliable implementation!

Don't have to wait for MoarVM - the folks at MoarVM didn't wait for Parrot to solve their problems (or they'd still be waiting).

This historical revisionism continues to be tiresome.

How are we to trust that Rakudo won't go the way of Pugs, or that MoarVM won't go the way of Parrot, leaving us in a lurch?

Some people will tell you to trust them. I, on the other hand, base my expectations on the history of the project and the actions of the people involved. I don't believe you can turn 15 years of disappointment and underperforming into something usable based on an arbitrary deadline enforced by yet another marketing announcement.

There obviously is some marketing involved, but in principle, this is less about Rakudo, and more about Larry freezing the 6.0 language version.

One can hope that development focus will then switch from semantics to things like stability, deployment and performance, ie the things you strongly advocated for years ago.

I guess we'll see if it's going to happen that way...

While it may be technically true that "Perl 6.0 released!" is an accurate headline if you define "Perl 6.0" as "the test suite for the 6.0 language version", I suspect that almost everyone reading that headline will expect to see a stable language implementation.

Given the reception to the past year's worth of discussion around "Get ready to party", it seems irresponsible to me to continue with these semantic distinctions, as they're lost on the intended audience.

> Rakudo and MoarVM clearly aren't what we, as potential Perl 6 developers and users, want.

Why not? A core implementation with its own VM (MRI+YARV for Ruby from 1.9 on, for instance) seems to be pretty common for languages.

> Like I said, we want the Perl 5, Ruby, Python, Lua, and Tcl type of experience.

But that's exactly what Rakudo + MoarVM offers. For the Ruby comparison, Rakudo is analogous to MRI, MoarVM is analogous to YARV.

> We want there to be one consistent implementation that's widely used and trusted.

And why can't Rakudo be that implementation?

> We want something proven and familiar.

Well, clearly, it won't be proven till its been around for a while in production use, and won't be familiar till you've used it for a while. But I don't see any reason that Rakudo (which is used for some things exposed to the public now) can't be the thing that ends up "proven and familiar"?

> Unfortunately, we aren't getting that with Rakudo and MoarVM

In what concrete way is that true?

> with half-baked interpreters written in an obscure language like Haskell

Because the author thought it to be fun. You know, hackers and all.

> or written in Perl 6 itself using half-baked Perl 6 to 5 converters

Oh, I don't think that ever happened.

You may be thinking of NQP? Which is still a Thing, and it's what Perl 6 is written in, which is amazing.

There was also the initial idea that Perl 6 could run Perl 5, but this is proving impossible. This is done now using the Inline::* modules, which will use say, the Perl 5 interpreter. [0]

So, there's one for Perl5 to allow for compatibility with Perl 5 modules, but also for Python[1], and most likely for x language. That's awesome!

Of course, the inverse is true, too. You can call up Perl 6, from Perl 5![2]

> or targeting the .NET CLR or JVM, or targeting very > obscure and limited VMs like Parrot or MoarVM.

Targeting .NET or JVM is also a good idea! Many languages do it. The general idea of Parrot shares a lot of interesting ideas with .NET - I almost want to say Parrot precedes .NET. The April Fools joke certainly did. If it didn't, Parrot was certainly inspired by .NET - or it was just an idea that was in the air at the time. Good idea!

[0] https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5 [1] https://github.com/niner/Inline-Python/ [2] https://metacpan.org/pod/Inline::Perl6

> or written in Perl 6 itself using half-baked Perl 6 to 5 converters

Oh, I don't think that ever happened.

That might be a reference to viv, which was used to implement STD (cf http://perl6.org/compilers/std-viv ).

There was also the initial idea that Perl 6 could run Perl 5, but this is proving impossible.

Personally, if Rakudo ever starts outperforming Perl5 for practical workloads, I believe that idea might eventually be revisited.

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