Matt Fowles wrote:
I am vaguely familiar with Topaz and a google search turns up a great deal of out of date information.
Is there somewhere I can find a postmortem of what went wrong/why the project was abandoned?
An article by Allison Randal, Dan Sugalski, & Leopold Tötsch ( http://www.developer.com/lang/perl/article.php/10940_3076571_2 ) does not really characterize the difficulties, but it does give some context:
<quote> Early Steps Toward Perl 6 Internals
The earliest progress toward implementing Perl 6 started before the current incarnation of Perl 6 was even conceived. The Topaz project, started in 1998, was spearheaded by Chip Salzenberg. It was a reimplementation of Perl 5 written in C++. The project was abandoned, but many of the goals and intended features for Topaz were adopted for Perl 6 internals, and the difficulties Topaz encountered were also valuable guides.
Sapphire was another early prototype that influenced the shape of Perl 6 internals. It was a one-week project in September 2000. The brainchild of Simon Cozens, Sapphire was another rewrite of Perl 5 internals. It was never intended for release, only as an experiment to see how far the idea could go in a week, and what lessons could be learned.
</quote>
HTH
