The Rakudo-ng change was a deliberate decision among Rakudo developers to improve infrastructure code and to make the project stronger in the near term. Not every line of code is fungible; the old code was far from compliance with the standard Perl 6 grammar and -ng is much closer. The old code made certain features difficult to implement; the new code already handles things like laziness and lists much more correctly. The old code was slower; the new code is measurably faster.

The status chart is a little bit misleading as well. It doesn't show the value of the features, nor their difficulty of implementation, nor the particular features you or anyone else needs to use Rakudo * for your own purposes. If the status chart had updates over the past week and a half, you'd also see that test reclamation is a lot faster now than it would have been with the old code.

In short, the -ng changes were deliberate, and if that breaks your heart, you should talk to the developers as a whole in #perl6 on irc.freenode.net for their perspective. (Though I don't recommend you saying "Why did you break things? Aren't you going to miss your goal? Did you ever think of not making changes?")

Maybe you'll feel better or more reassured by talking directly to the people who are involved with Rakudo instead of posting your questions on some forum? I presume that they have more intimate knowledge of the answers to your questions.

As for your questions, I see are some questionable ideas behind them. You seem to convey the idea that the refactoring is done already, but as the number of falling tests indicates, it's obviously not.

You use the term "we" as if you were involved, yet your (lack of) knowledge shows that you are not involved with Rakudo. Your use of "we" could also imply that members of this site are involved, but so far, none of those who might be involved have spoken up. I think that the "we" that "should make a production release a priority" will decide on their priorities themselves. If you want to be given a vote in the priorities, I guess you'll have to seek out the persons who make Rakudo happen.

Your speculation on what might have been if "this refactoring" had not happened is moot. I guess you're free to do your own programming with Rakudo-old instead of Rakudo-ng, then you will find out how many more features you can put into Rakudo-old instead of working on Rakudo-ng.

But I'm not sure what the intent of your questions is, unless you're just trolling. Looking on this site for Rakudo or via Google shows only a few posts, and almost no discussion of Rakudo, so maybe you're just in the wrong place. I'm not sure what the right place is, but I guess it would be irc, or maybe one of the mailing lists, or somewhere else.

"We" refers to people from the community who are eagerly waiting for that release to happen. Of course I'm not a contributor to rakudo and that is the reason why I'm asking this question.


Please let me know if its against Perl Monks policies to talk about rakudo or Perl 6 here. If that is the case, I seriously apologize as I understand most of the moderators are taking their personal time to moderate this forum. I would be equally irritated if someone would waste my time without purpose.

I asked this question as I thought Perl monks can be used to ask both Perl 5 and Perl 6 questions. I didn't know we have infighting within the family already.

I don't know about your priorities, and what's more important to you, asking the questions or getting the answers. My comment was less about asking the questions, and more about getting the answers. As far as I'm aware, the people who work on Rakudo mostly keep to themselves, or rather, aren't really active on this site.

I'm not sure about infighting, but you might be unaware that not everybody eagerly awaits The Second Coming of Perl (or its dromedary incarnations). So I guess you can avoid some confusion by specifying the people you mean by "we" a bit more instead of assuming that "we" means "people like me", without having given your "me" some more shape.