As many of you may have gleaned from some of the recent Parrot
announcements, we now have the Perl6/Parrot compiler ("perl6")
passing all of the "01-sanity" tests. Special thanks go to
Will Coleda (Coke), chromatic, Jerry Gay (particle), Mark
Glines, and anyone else I might have forgotten for their efforts
in getting us to this milestone.
Now that we've reached the milestone, it's a good opportunity
to outline where I think things will head from here.
First, I had erroneously anticipated that by passing the 01-sanity
tests we would then be able to quickly make use the Test.pm module
that is in Pugs. Unfortunately, that module seems to have evolved
substantially (in entirely reasonable ways, I will add), so Test.pm
now makes use of Perl 6 features that we haven't yet implemented
in the perl6 compiler, and that may take a bit of time yet to develop.
While we will certainly continue to focus on getting Test.pm to run,
we also want to progress on other components at the same time.
So, in all likelihood we'll build a very temporary Test.pm be able
to start running other tests, until we're sufficiently far enough
along to converge on the Pugs Test.pm module.
This is also a good time to make an official declaration that for
the foreseeable future, the test suite that exists in Pugs will
be the designated canonical test suite for perl6-on-parrot. In fact,
the current plan is that all patches and commits to the Perl 6 test
suite will continue to take place in the Pugs repository, and then
we'll find ways to make those tests easily available for use by
the perl6 compiler in Parrot.
This will also make it easy for people to participate in contributing
and revising tests -- just get a Pugs commit bit!
As we start looking at resolving tests, we'll also want to look at
the test files themselves, and making sure they're still consistent
with the Perl 6 specification as it has evolved. As questions or
inconsistencies arise, we can post them to this list (or perl6-language)
for clarifications and decisions.
Lastly, we're always looking for people who can help with the building
of the perl6 compiler itself, and patches are welcome! Just get the
latest version of parrot from http://www.parrotcode.org/ and start
looking in the languages/perl6/ directory.
Yes, perl6 still requires a fair knowledge of PIR -- we're working
on tools to substantially reduce that. We're also going to be
providing more information about the compiler on the mailing list
and in various documents, and there will be sessions and hackathons
at YAPC::NA for people who want to get involved there.
Thanks!
Pm
