There's at least three separate and (somewhat) unrelated projects going on here, all under the banner of "Perl6".
  1. The design of the Perl6 language

    This is taking place primarily on perl6-language and Freenode#perl6 and is probably going to take about another year to fully complete. The vast majority of the language has been specced out and you can use a lot of it right now in Perl5.

  2. Pugs

    This is the testbed for Perl6 language design. It's the place that two very important things are taking place:

    1. Language features are being tested
    2. Tests are being written for language features
    The goal is that the test suite written for Pugs will be test suite for Perl6. That's a huge development effort that needs to happen that's happening right now.

    Another rather neat side-effect of Pugs is that multiple VMs are targetable by Pugs, including Parrot. This is demonstrating a rather interesting feature of separating language from implementation which no Perl version has ever had.

  3. Parrot

    Parrot is the primary VM target for Perl6. This is probably going to take at least another 2-3 years for a stable Parrot to come out. But, it's arguably the most ambitious F/OSS project ever undertaken. The idea that a group of (mostly) volunteers can create a VM that will be able to run nearly every language ever designed on nearly any OS ever deployed and do so with good performance characteristics is still being laughed at. Yet, it's becoming a reality. Ten years for something like that isn't too long to wait, imho.

    Did I forget to mention that you will be able to run a program in one language and use libraries from another, so long as all the languages run on Parrot? That smells like a .Net killer, to me ...

  4. PGE

    The Perl Grammar Engine. This is what will let you redefine Perl6 syntax within a given scope. This should take about another year or so. (It would go quicker if Patrick didn't have to write it in PIR, which is a glorified assembly language.)

Personally, the most interesting aspect of this is taking the ideas generated on P6l and port them to Perl5. There's a ton of things that can be brought over to making our lives easier.

My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

In reply to Re: Perl 6 - I hope it won't take a decade by dragonchild
in thread Perl 6 - I hope it won't take a decade by Anonymous Monk

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