in reply to Which 'Perl6'? (And where?)

Pugs is abandoned. Cross that off your list.

Use Rakudo. Rakudo supports a number of different VMs. Its support for Parrot is the most mature, but if you want threads forget that. Threading is still a "coming soon" topic for Rakudo on MoarVM and JVM. If I had to place a bet on one of them, I'd go with JVM, as the JVM itself already has tried and tested support for threads.

toby döt ink

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Re^2: Which 'Perl6'? (And where?)
by raiph (Deacon) on Jul 14, 2014 at 06:51 UTC
    »»» This post is about the immature Perl 6, not the rock solid Perl 5 «««

    Why do you say threading support is "coming soon"? The implementation is immature and there's lots more to spec and implement over coming years but pretty much all the classes, methods, etc. named in the Concurrency Synopsis are implemented in Rakudo and that's a pretty substantial set of tools, sufficient for many scenarios.

    There's no regular end user doc. There's the Concurrency Synopsis and jnthn's Reactive programming in Perl 6 presentation (make sure to use the latest version of the example code in the reactive examples code repo; and here's a video if you like watching "Bob"). And/or checkout Perl 6: what can you do today? which is built around an extended example, including applying concurrency toward the end.

    The JVM and its JIT are mature, making it the right choice for a lot of concurrent or long running code. MoarVM is immature but uses a lot less RAM than JVM, starts much faster, is where most optimization work is being done, is where key features such as NFG (for Unicode data) are due to be implemented first, and is most devs' preferred backend.

    I'd advise waiting for the next Rakudo Star, due in a few weeks from this list, and trying code with both MoarVM and JVM backends.

    (8.25 updates: JVM is mature, there was no 2014.07 Rakudo Star. Thanks to whoever added the 8.25 update. A 2014.08 Rakudo Star is now available. I also edited the bit about maturity to make it clearer that MoarVM is immature.)

    »ö« . o O ( "the celebrity tell-all of the Perl-6 cult?" )

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      Perhaps threading is better implemented than I thought. My knowledge may well be out of date in this area. Though I'll note that even moarvm.com says:

      "For long-running workloads where startup time doesn't matter, or when you need tried-and-tested, mature threading support, Rakudo on the JVM is a better bet; its JIT compiler gets to work and makes quite a difference."

      Certainly I'd agree that overall MoarVM is likely to turn out to be the best Perl 6 VM. But the question asked specifically about threading, and it looks to me like the JVM backend is the best bet - at least for now.

      toby döt ink
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      There's no regular end user doc. There's {the Concurrency Synopsis} and jnthn's {Reactive programming in Perl 6} presentation

      A year on and there remains one problem with both those links: it not that they are fantasy -- they are, but that's not the problem -- its that the people around the authors of those documents don't realise that that are fantasy.

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