I’ve been increasingly interested in partaking in perl6 development as of late. I have been keeping up with the various efforts and perl headlines. I even bought the first perl6 book when it was first released.

Lately, I have been keeping an svn checkout of parrot up to date making sure it compiles properly. The most popular implementation of perl6 appears to currently be Rakudo, which is perl6 on parrot. I was originally following the pugs implementation in haskell but was completely turned off by the language of choice. My attention was forced elsewhere due the primary developer losing focus, abandoning pugs.

Being written in PASM (Parrot Assembly Language), it has received plenty of attention. Also, because it is distributed (temporarity) with parrot in the languages section, there is no short supply of active developers.

Pugs did give the perl6 community one great thing: a starting point for the test suite. As of right now, all of the rakudo tests are pulling the test suite from the pugscode repo. This is a great starting point for any implementation and helps centralize the entire perl6 test suite (the pugscode suite is largely incomplete).

Last night, I was discussing the current state of the perl6 implementations with a few of the developers in the IRC #perl6 channel. I was caught up on what’s going on in the community and found a focus. My urge to write some slick new perl6 code can be satiated by working on the pugscode suite. Eventually, I’d like to start solving those problems in the Rakudo implemtation as well.

We’d like you to join us as a author for Pugs.

My interest and enthusiasm must have impressed someone, because one of the developers gave me commitbit access to the pugscode repo. If I submit enough quality patches to parrot/rakudo, I will get parrot/rakudo commit access as well. While pugs itself may be abandonware, the test suite is still the most advanced yet and is in active development.

Join me in #perl6 and help propel perl6 into history as the most powerful language available, yet again.

tags: irc, parrot, perl, perl6, pugscode, rakudo