Rakudo provides Perl 6 preview

By Alex Handy

June 23, 2009 — (Page 1 of 2)
Since the initial call for papers on the subject, Perl 6 has become an almost mythical update. But after nine years of work, and heavy collaboration with the open-source Parrot project, Perl 6 is finally beginning to get ready for public use. One of the Perl 6 virtual machine implementations, Rakudo, has been slowly creeping toward completion, and its developers say it is now ready for experimentation.

Rakudo is built on top of the Parrot project, which seeks to build a generic runtime for all dynamic languages. Patrick Michaud, lead developer of Rakudo, started working on the Parrot project five years ago. At the time, he was overwhelmed by the changes he saw in Perl, and he wondered how exactly they could be implemented at all.

“The specification [for Perl 6] is divided up into synopses," said Michaud. "They roughly correspond to the chapters of the Camel book [O'Reilly's seminal Perl programming guide]. My jaw dropped when I read the chapter on regular expressions. Perl 5 regular expressions are what everyone raves about. What the Perl 6 design team especially did was to go back and rethink regular expressions. What would they want to do to make that more powerful, so you could write the Perl 6 parser in Perl 6?

“To me, it was like a whole new level of regular expression power. The first thing we needed to have a compiler [was] to have a parser. The first year or so of my work was writing this regular expression engine that, as far as I know, nobody had ever thought of before. When I first read this before I started working on the project, I thought to myself, 'Nobody could ever do this!' ”

The tricky thing here for Michaud and the Rakudo team is that the grammar of Perl 6 can be modified dynamically at runtime. That's difficult enough, but also making sure that such modified grammar doesn't spill out to negatively influence libraries or other Perl applications is even trickier, said Michaud. But all of the work he and his team have put in over the last five years has allowed this vision to become reality, he said, and it gives Perl 6 an incredible amount of versatility.

Related Search Term(s): Parrot, Perl, Rakudo

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