Rakudo Perl 6

Rakudo Perl
Preview release #87 "Vladivostok" [1] / April 23, 2015
Operating system Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, OS X, NetBSD
Type Compiler
License Artistic License 2.0
Website www.rakudo.org

Rakudo Perl is a Perl 6 compiler targeting MoarVM, and the Java Virtual Machine, that implements the Perl 6 specification.[2] It is currently in development.

Originally developed within the Parrot project, the Rakudo source code repository was split from the project in February 2009 so that it could be developed independently, although there were still many dependencies at the time. Rakudo is written in C, Perl 6, and the lightweight Perl 6 implementation "NQP" (Not Quite Perl).[3]

The monthly releases occur sometime within a few days after the third Tuesday of the month, usually the following Thursday.[4] Rakudo Perl #14 was released in February 2009, codenamed Vienna after the Perl mongers group that had sponsored one of its developers since April 2008. Subsequent releases have used codenames based on Perl mongers groups.

The first major release of a distribution of both compiler and modules (named "Rakudo *" or "Rakudo Star") was released on July 29, 2010.[5] The most recent release of Rakudo Star was made on March 21, 2015.[6]

Name

The name "Rakudo" for the Perl 6 compiler was first suggested by Damian Conway.[7] "Rakudo" is short for "Rakuda-dō" (with a long 'o'; 駱駝道), which is Japanese for "Way of the Camel". "Rakudo" (with a short 'o'; 楽土) also means "paradise" in Japanese.

The term "Rakudo Perl" was also chosen to distinguish between the name of a language implementation ("Rakudo") from the name of the language specification ("Perl 6"). To understand why, one must understand that Perl 6 is a specification and any implementation that passes the official test suite could call itself “Perl 6”. There are currently several implementations at various levels of maturity.[2][8]

References

  1. ↑ "Download Packages". Retrieved 2015-04-23.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Perl 6 Compilers". Retrieved 2010-03-19.
  3. ↑ Michaud, Patrick (2011-06-14). "Rakudo architectural overview". Retrieved 2012-06-24.
  4. ↑ Sośnierz, Tadeusz (21 March 2014). "Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, Development Release #74 ("Adelaide.pm")". Retrieved 2014-03-21.
  5. ↑ Linux Today (30 July 2010). "Announce: Rakudo Star — a useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6". Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  6. ↑ Lenz, Moritz (2015-03-21). "Announce: Rakudo Star Release 2015.03". Retrieved 2015-03-23.
  7. ↑ O'Reilly FYI (21 August 2008). "The Mind of Damian Conway: Science, Computer Science, the Future of Perl 6, and Advice for Today's Aspiring Programmers". Retrieved 2013-12-30.
  8. ↑ Lenz, Moritz (23 October 2009). "We write a Perl 6 book for you". Retrieved 2012-01-02.

External links