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A different look at Perl6's official release

Released on December 24, 2015, Perl 6 Version 1.0 is also  Perl 6.c or Perl 6 Christmas, a reference to this festive season. We look at why Perl 6 has taken so long to get to its first official release and how it will impact the Perl community.

The Perl 6 project was announced back in 2000. It has taken 15 years since then to reach the first official release.
Why so long?
One reason is that Perl's original creator and main architect Larry Wall faced some serious health problems in the intervening period. A more significant one is that the features that the language would implement like gradual typing and mutable grammars were ahead of their time.

A radical Virtual Machine for Perl 6

Add to that the switch from one VM to another, porting the compiler suite from Parrot VM to the JVM and to MoarVM in parallel, which meant catering and designing for a new bytecode infrastructure.
Also, since Perl 6 was destined to be a gradually typed language, the considerations were different from if it was dynamically typed, so there was interest in VMs which explicitly seek to do both static and dynamic typing.


full item on i-programmer
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