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by RichardCA 4151 days ago
Thanks, my intention in asking the question was to see if there is any willingness to speak about what will ship. I don't need a pedantic explanation of the runtimes, I want to know if a decision has been made to get behind one of them. I've been waiting 15 years to hear some actual details about what I can expect when I install this thing.
2 comments
SwellJoe 4151 days ago
MoarVM is the closest to "ready", and seems to be what most of the developers actually using Perl 6 today are using. But, as the prior post mentioned, Rakudo-JVM and Rakuda-Parrot are also getting closer to ready. All of them will likely "ship", as long as the developers keep working on them, and Perl 6 code will likely run correctly on any of them.

Here is the current feature test statuses of the Perl 6 compilers/runtimes: http://perl6.org/compilers/features

Note that the Rakudo-MoarVM runtime is the closest to feature complete, with Rakudo-JVM close behind.

In short, you can expect you'll get whichever runtime you install, and if that runtime is ready for production you can expect that Perl 6 will work on that runtime. MoarVM will likely be the first to be ready for production.

You may have other reasons for choosing a runtime; if you have a Java/Clojure/Scala shop and wanted a powerful scripting language to integrate into your systems, the JVM runtime might be just the thing. If you wanted the fastest Perl 6 for standalone Perl 6 applications, MoarVM will likely be it (I think, I haven't looked at benchmarks, just guessing). The FFI may be easier to work with in MoarVM, if you need C or other compiled external libraries...but maybe not. I'm not at all familiar with how that works in JVM runtimes, but it seems like it would be more convoluted.

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kbenson 4151 days ago
Why wait? I assume it will be similar to Rakudo Star, which packages[0] Perl 6 for regular consumption on a semi-monthly (quarterly now?) basis, which you can download windows installers for here[1]. If you aren't on windows, compile, it's not that hard, directions are included in the github repo for Rakudo[2] under INSTALL.txt. You can see more info on that at the Rakudo website[3].

0: MSI installers for MoarVM and Parrot, I assume JVM bytecode it includes is in there as it stated it ships with "experimental JVM support."

1: http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/

2: https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo

3: http://rakudo.org/

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