Features/Rakudo Perl 6

Rakudo Perl 6

Summary

Rakudo is an implementation of the Perl 6 specification for the Parrot virtual machine, currently in development.

Owners

• Name: Gerd Pokorra, Christoph Wickert

• email: <gerd@fedoraproject.org>, <cwickert@fedoraproject.org>

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 12
• Last updated: 2009-08-06
• Percentage of completion: 100%
  • 2009-07-21: Parrot 1.4.0 "Mundo Cani" released
  • 2009-07-22: Parrot 1.4 built for Fedora >= 10
  • 2009-07-23: Rakudo 19 (July 2009) released, starting to work on the files
  • 2009-07-27: Initial rakudo package
  • 2009-07-29: Rakudo packaged
  • 2009-07-31: minor tweaks during review
  • 2009-08-03: Rakudo imported into CVS, still working on it with upstream
  • 2009-08-06: Rakudo built. Can be installed from the repos for testing.
  • 2009-08-06: A scratch build is made for Fedora 10. So testing the initial Rakudo package even under Fedora 10 and 11 with it (https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1586036) is possible.
  • 2009-08-06: man page is added in the Fedora 12 upstream
  • 2009-08-11: put a Rakudo package with stripped shared objects in Fedora 11 and 12
  • 2009-08-22: put the new releases from Rakudo and Parrot in Fedora 12

Detailed Description

Perl 6 is a major revision to the Perl programming language, which introduces elements of many modern and historical languages. There are currently multiple implementation projects of Perl 6 underway, the most actively developed one is Rakudo, which is based on the Parrot virtual machine.

Benefit to Fedora

Providing Perl 6 support makes Fedora an attractive platform for developers. Rakudo will enable developers to write new applications or port existing ones. By offering Perl 6 at the current state Fedora once again proves it's foundations Features and First

Scope

• Package reviews
• Continuous updates each month

How To Test

• Test that rakudo builds on the parrot RPMs provided in Fedora.
• Use the test suite included in Rakudo to verify that it actually works:
  • make test will run a suite of tests, designed to make sure that the Rakudo compiler is basically working and that it's capable of running a simple test harness.
  • make spectest will import relevant portions of the official Perl 6 test suite from the Pugs repository and run all of the tests that are currently known to pass.

User Experience

Rakudo will enable developers to write new applications or port existing ones to Perl 6. Although Perl 6 is still in development and no official release date has been set, the specification is feature complete and mature. Rakudo has released 19 stable releases so far. Both parrot and rakudo do one stable release each month and developers will get them easily without hassle on a regular schedule.

Dependencies

• Parrot >= 1.4: Review, in Fedora >= 10)
• Rakudo: Review

(Note that parrot is a build dependency and not required at runtime.)

Contingency Plan

Drop the rakudo package from Fedora 12.

Documentation

• Wikipedia: Perl 6 and Rakudo Perl
• Official Perl 6 Documentation
• Perl 6 on the Perl Foundation Homepage
• Rakudo Homepage
• Rakudo Documentation
• Installation of Rakudo in Fedora and Windows (by Gerd, German, sorry)
• Hacking Rakudo Perl by Patrick Michaud

Release Notes

• This release of Fedora comes with Rakudo Perl, an implementation of the Perl 6 specification based on the Parrot virtual machine, which enables developers to write new applications or port existing ones to Perl 6. To install rakudo, use the Add/Remove Software tool or run:

su -c 'yum install rakudo'

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/Rakudo Perl 6