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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Tamarin 7 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • 'cuz what the world really needed was yet another port of the most basic, procedural, declare-variables part of Perl 6 to yet another VM.

    • Well, all three backends of Pugs contains closures and object model support.

      The fourth backend, namely the Parrot one, indeed lacks in those features, and I'm sorry I haven't been been able to keep up with that backend.

      • I haven't been been able to keep up with that backend.

        I find it interesting to speculate where any single backend might be today if not for all of the duplicate work poured into all of the others.

        • But that is as feasible as having Guido, Matz and Larry working on one single language. :-)

          That is, fglock++ wouldn't find it fun to hack the Haskell backend; neither would I have as much fun hacking the JS1 backend as iblech++, who probably wouldn't have as much fun hacking on the Perl5 backend...

          • I would find it highly fun to have a usable, fairly complete Perl 6. I don't think I'm so alone among most of the other Perl programmers who are not you, fglock, and iblech.

            It's nice that you're having fun, I suppose. Meanwhile, if it's not too much of a downer, would you mind finishing something? PIL or PIL^2 or whatever it is now would be nice. As I mentioned over a year ago, I was willing to work on a Parrot backend for Pugs if someone would have told me what it needed from Parrot.

            • While we are on the subject of completion and usability, nearly half a year ago you wrote [mail-archive.com]:
              > Where does Parrot fit in all of this?

              I am speaking for myself, not Audrey (or anyone else) here. I believe that it will be the most complete and most performant backend in the near and medium future.

              I appreciate that Parrot people are now working on regularizing the designs and the underlying APIs, as well as revamping Parrot's own intermediate languages. Those are highly needed tasks that will make Parrot more friendly as a target platform.

              However, it remains Parrot/Perl6 does not support subroutines, arrays and hashes to this day, which makes it even less expressive than Perl 1. It's futile to talk about completeness or performance -- there are few meaningful benchmarks you can run on a language without subroutines.

              And as you have witnessed, several people working on Parrot finds it more fun to implement e.g. Lua and Tcl, as you did for Scheme; that is very much natural and healthy.

              However, if you deem that multiple backends delays the development of Pugs mainline, then the same line of reasoning indicates that multiple frontends of Parrot rendered its Perl 6 implementation almost completely abandoned for the last 3 months, judging by the few commits went into it.

              I do not support that line of reasoning; to me it is natural that people only work on projects when sufficient motivation is provided.

              I hope to get as much people as possible working on Perl 6 by tying their motivation with the Pugs roadmap, but I refuse to tell my collaborators they must concentrate on some single subproject, and I never set a deadline. I think they are counterproductive to our task at hand, and time will tell if it works out better in the end.

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