The "main" backend as I see it, in the near future, is definitely the Perl 5 runtime for production use <snip/>
Codegen to that runtime is probably going to be written in
Perl 5 in Pugs::Compiler::Perl6 space, although it may also happen at Perl 6 space, Parrot space, or Haskell space. (The author-side tools has higher flexibility; the client-side runtime must only assume pure Perl5 and maybe selected well-known XS modules.)
So, as of now, you envision svn:/pugs/misc/pX/Common/Pugs-Compiler-Perl6 to be the "main" engine for Perl 6 ? Will this be written only in pure Perl 5 ? And parts of it will be rewritten in Perl 6, and thereby eventually we'll have a Perl 6 engine itself written in Perl 6 ? If this is the case, is the purpose of the other backend engines simply -Ofun or more than that? :-) Where does Parrot fit in all of this? But in the long run, it'll just be different runtimes for different
environment. Python has maybe 10 implementations, half of them quite complete; Scheme has more than 20; it's really good for Perl 6 to be retargettable across different runtimes as well.
Makes sense. It's good to have different engines suitable for different purposes ... Thanks for taking the time to reply! Swaroop
