Both: it's not the root cause, but it's an important and obvious symptom.
Will that be fixed any time soon?
How about my questions to you?
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Thanks for your (relatively) straight answer.
Will that be fixed any time soon?
You don't seem to have noticed that, but the Rakudo Star releases are our attempt at fixing that. The "star" releases aim at providing modules, documentation and stability to the user.
Since the current development branch ("nom") has had quite a few regressions against the old master branch, we haven't made any new star release from it so far (though 4 months aren't that much, compared to the release cycles of many other projects). So people who use the star releases enjoy much more of the stability you seek. We'll take care to make the next star release as compatible with previous star releases as we reasonably can, though of course module authors and end users still have to track spec changes.
You seem to oppose the big rewrites that Rakudo has gone through, though so far I haven't seen you proposing any viable alternatives. I can see how annoying the breakage is that comes with such a rewrite, but we don't do them for fun; we do them because we see no other way to implement large-scale changes that need to be implemented in order to advance Rakudo. What would you do instead?
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... we see no other way to implement large-scale changes that need to be implemented in order to advance Rakudo.
I find it difficult to believe that porting 6model to multiple backends is essential to make Rakudo usable for end users in 2011 or 2012. "Fun" about sums it up from my perspective.
What would you do instead?
What any other project would do if it wanted to convince its target audience that it can produce a relevant and usable product: ask them what they need, then make it so.
What I want: libraries, documentation, stability, regular improvements on a fixed schedule, and protection from Morton's fork with regard to choosing between running an abandoned old version or getting performance improvements at the cost of severe regressions.
Perhaps that means making something like Blizkost work (and keeping it working) instead of checking off tickboxes like "auto-parallelizing metaoperators" and "custom operators" and "hygenic macros".
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