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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

So just curious can anyone share their uses of Perl 6 and if they have anything going on in production? I already know that CraigsList at one point (if not still) is powered by Perl, but I'm not sure which Perl that is really.

On another note: I find it quite fascinating that Perl 6 is implemented in Perl 6, that would in theory allow you to implement Perl for .NET or the JVM and retain plenty of Perl as a result if I'm not mistaken.

Edit: fixed up my post

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Answering your question:

I haven't heard of anything in PROD yet (there is a QUORA question on this), but I know there are several Perl shops that would jump on this when it's fully ready. You can use it today for most things (assuming hard performance isn't needed). When the optimizations and JIT are complete, you'll have a very fast OO language with optional types. My intended use cases are for pretty much anything that doesn't need a GUI like a .NET desktop app. I have a LOT of data at work and look forward to using the Grammar functionality to build useful and beautiful parsing code.

I believe Perl6 is bootstrapped by a subsection of Perl6 called NQP (not quite perl)which is written in C.

I remember an earlier Perl6/Rakudo post here (I think), where chromatic showed up and mentioned a few things that had been running reliably for a couple years in his stack. That it was at least "good enough" for his purposes.

That's hard to believe. I've never heard chromatic have anything positive to say about Perl 6.

He put lots of hard work into the project, he wouldn't have done that if he had nothing positive to say. (But sure, lots of stuff have been backported to Perl 5, so the step up to Perl 6 is smaller today.)

He seemed a bit unhappy with some of the internal mess of the development, but that is not exactly uncommon for big projects.

Chromatic used to be a proponent of Perl6, defending it against criticism and claims of being vaporware. I don't quite remember when he became a critic, 2010-ish or so.

Around the time when Rakudo further detached itself from Parrot, and declared an effort to support alternative VMs (eventually writing one of its own).

No, I think it was well before that, and he was just more vocal at that point. IIRC became rather disillusioned with the project quite a while back, and he wasn't even involved with it (maybe nominally) at that point.

a few things that had been running reliably for a couple years in his stack

They stopped running reliably several years ago and I stopped caring.

Oh, well, there ya go!

Interesting, hopefully that day comes sooner rather than later. I too would love to play with Perl 6 when it's official.

The first stable version was officially released November 28, 2015.

Please reread https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/christmas-is-he...

Note especially this passage:

  ...the primary deliverable ... is the language specification, known as “roast” (Repository Of All Spec Tests) ...

In other words it's roast, the digital acceptance test for any candidate Perl 6 compiler, that is arguably the only thing that was officially declared, and hence the only thing that could be construed to have been officially declared any particular thing such as "stable".

Continuing:

  ... This Rakudo release targets those tests (over 120 thousand of them), and passes them all on at least some architectures when the moon is in the right phase.

Rakudo is a Perl 6 compiler (so that one can try out the announced language).

Note the moon phase comment. While obviously not literal and arguably misleading it is a brilliantly concise and precise explanation of the degree to which Rakudo, the leading Perl 6 compiler, should or could be characterized as officially "stable".

I see that http://perl6.org/compilers/features shows no implementation of the language is complete yet. However http://rakudo.org/2016/02/03/announce-rakudo-star-release-20... does describe itself as a "a useful and usable production distribution of Perl 6." I believe that's the first release they've described as ready for production.

This was a mistake on my part, I got this from the Perl 6 wikipedia page. It linked to

http://rakudo.org/2015/11/28/announce-rakudo-star-release-20...

which describes a beta release. It should probably have the date of 2016-02-03 and link to

http://rakudo.org/2016/02/03/announce-rakudo-star-release-20...

which describes that release as "a useful and usable production distribution of Perl 6."

You can go to http://rakudo.org/, download it, and play with it now :)

I recommend a look at a couple of videos to get started too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0OGsFmPW2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpqnNCx7wVY

NQP is actually bootstrapped, so it's written in NQP. NQP in turn has different backends targetting different virtual machines. The backend used by almost everyone is the MoarVM backend (a VM made specifically for the Perl 6 object model, which is written in C), and there's also a JVM backend. The Parrot backend is pretty much legacy at this point, and there's an experimental JavaScript backend.

> On another note: I find it quite fascinating that Perl 6 is implemented in Perl 6, that would in theory allow you to implement Perl for .NET or the JVM

Rakudo already has a JVM backend! It's not used as much as the MoarVM backend, mostly because the startup time of the JVM is horrible, but it's there. A Javascript backend is being worked on.

Yea I think the JVM backend was broken recently by a patch (if I remember correctly), but should be fixed soon if not already. I'm surprised it actually works so well when MoarVM isn't 100% done.

I assume the JVM would allow you to use Java libraries as well?

That sort of thing doesn't sound encouraging to someone who is keen to try Perl 6 with the intention of using it for real world projects.

Just use a Rakudo Star release on MoarVM and it will be stable. Since Christmas it will be stable and conform to the official 'Perl 6.C' language specification. A lot of people in Perl6 land keep up with HEAD development building the Rakudo compiler from source daily/weekly with a tool called rakudobrew. HEAD by definition can sometimes be funky, a lot of the reports floating around are use cases against development builds and not official releases. Rakudo improves daily the development is that rapid. With the spec frozen the improvements are mostly performance, relatively obscure bugs and nice things like a better REPL.

> I think the JVM backend was broken recently by a patch

That's a wrong way to describe it.

There were some important performance related changes to the spec prior to the Christmas release. The focus was on keeping MoarVM backend up-to-date, that's my understanding.

From the perspective of someone trying to use it, the connotations of the description of the breakage are tears in the rain

Anyone trying to use Perl6 should use MoarVM backend, which was the only supported one for Christmas release.

Perl6 test suite is massive, you can't "break it with a patch", a commit like that would've been reverted.

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