Parrot, Rakudo and Perl 6

This week I downloaded parrot and subsequently Perl 6. For those of you that don't know. Parrot is a runtime environment for dynamic languages. You can use parrot to write a compiler. Parrot was dreamed up by the same people that were writing Perl 6. Rakudo, which is the perl6 compiler written in Parrot is interesting but not yet production ready.

I tried using rakudo to work through a Perl 6 tutorial that I found but when I tried to get it to accept standard input rakudo puked up a stack trace. So either I am doing something wrong, rakudo isn't ready, or the tutorial is crap.

Anyway, I am excited about Perl 6. Start here to check it out. Perl 6 was conceived by specification. That means that that there can be multiple implementations of Perl 6. As long as it passes a spec test, a Perl 6 compiler will run code correctly. In fact, there is another implementation of Perl 6 started by Audrey Tang.

Perl 6 is about 8 years in the making. It looks like it is in its final development stages. The search for documentation is on . . .