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Comment by perlgeek | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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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