[kanatohodets]

It's a list of projects all loosely oriented around untying Perl 5 the language from perl the runtime. Perl 6 has already done this, with several (Parrot, JVM, Mono/.NET) VMs currently working fairly successfully, if a tad slowly still.

Personally I'm most excited about perlito (which features perl 5 compiled to javascript, among other things) and p2, which promises to be a super-speedy rendition of Perl 5 based on why the lucky stiff's last public project, the Potion language/VM.

The idea, as I understand it, is that if both Perl 5 and Perl 6 are running on the same VM, they can share library code on the level of that VM's bytecode.

All of that said, perl the runtime remains actively maintained and improved. End Perl users are just going to have some choices, much as Ruby users have had for a while (JRuby vs MRI, for example).