Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

http://blogs.perl.org/users/shadowcat_mdk/2015/02/fosdem-2015-its-christmas.html

by eperoumal • 11 years ago

145 143 11 years ago

blogs.perl.org

nemo2• 11 years ago

Good on them, really hope they make the release.

trollian• 11 years ago

15 years late...

wantarray6• 11 years ago

Late for what, exactly?

Do people no longer write code? Because if they do, some of them might might choose to use Perl 6 for that, and that's all the success a programming language can hope for.

I see no reason why Perl 6 can't find its niche among people who prefer the Perlish over the Pythonic way to approach problems, but want a modern, consistent, cruft-free language (which Perl 5 is not).

alexandre_m• 11 years ago

If they wanted a modern, consistent and cruft-free language then those people most likely already moved to something better.

I'm not against Perl or its evolution, but I don't see the point to learn this today when you have so many better scripting language alternatives with established community and rich libraries available.

cwyers3• 11 years ago

Late to having a large, committed community and momentum. 15 years ago, Perl was Real Big (although I think even then PHP was starting to eat its lunch). If you launched Perl 6 then, you had a lot of active Perl projects you could talk into switching. Now, Perl 6 is Just Another Language, and it faces most of the struggles any new language/runtime would face, plus the added burden of carrying everyone's preconceptions about what Perl is along with it.

bonif2• 11 years ago

After 15 years you're like sed || awk. Something you know is there, and you can use. Not something to start a new project with. PS. 15 year ago a Pentium 3(750Mhz) was a top class CPU

Diederich• 11 years ago

As I said over on perl.org: From the bottom of my heart, thank you. I have been keenly looking forward to this for a long, long time.

I think there's a good chance that Perl6 will not only become 'relevant in the large', once again, but also, once again, be a driving force in the overall improvement of our industry.

DonHopkins5• 11 years ago

I agree: Perl could lead the industry by example to slow down and take 15 years to ship everything. Then everybody wouldn't have to work overtime so hard and so often, toil late into the night burning the midnight oil, and ignore their families, pets and social life.

kbenson13• 11 years ago

I want to downvote you for the played out jab, but your sentiment on the industry in general is worth being heard.

mseepgood• 11 years ago

In hexadecimal?

muraiki6• 11 years ago

If you want to have an idea of what makes Perl 6 compelling, check these slides that were submitted a few days ago, "Perl 6 for Mere Mortals" (which is also another talk at FOSDEM): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953368

I hate to repeat a comment of mine, but for the sake of emphasizing just how different Perl 6 is, here's a version of Fibonacci in Perl 6:

  subset NonNegativeInt of Int where * >= 0;

  proto fib (|) is cached returns NonNegativeInt {*}
  multi fib (0) { 0 }
  multi fib (1) { 1 }
  multi fib (NonNegativeInt $n) { fib($n - 1) + fib($n - 2) }

  say fib(100)

Edit: Another good recent talk is "Adventures in Perl 6 Asynchrony," which shows off promise combinators, channels, and supplies: http://jnthn.net/papers/2014-yapceu-async.pdf

walterbell3• 11 years ago

Thanks for the presentations. Have you seen any performance benchmarks? It would also be good to see Lua included in the language comparisons.

muraiki6• 11 years ago

I'm not sure about any current Perl6 vs other language benchmarks; older benchmarks aren't terribly useful because within the past year MoarVM both became the dominant P6 VM and also received substantial performance optimizations. My understanding is that this is one of the big goals of this year.

Another one of Johnathon's excellent presentations goes into depth about the kinds of optimizations being made in MoarVM: http://jnthn.net/papers/2014-yapceu-performance.pdf

steveklabnik• 11 years ago

In his talk, Larry specifically said something like "Please understand that we may or may not be comparable to Perl5 in some benchmarks, and that speed is something we're working on. We'll get there, and it's good enough already for many tasks."

wantarray6• 11 years ago

The author of that snippet was probably just trying to demonstrate multi-method dispatch using a familiar example; I don't think that's how people would actually calculate Fibonacci numbers in Perl 6.

I expect most would either use plain 'ol imperative code if that's what they're used to (from Perl 5), or do it with the sequence construction operator (triple dot):

  my @fib := 0, 1, *+* ... *;

...which looks funky on first sight, but is really just another operator.

From what I've seen so far, Perl 6 code is still similar to Perl code. Presentation snippets tend to focus on specific new features and should not be taken as representative samples of real-life code.

muraiki6• 11 years ago

I wrote the above snippet, but it was basically just one step beyond what Curtis Ovid Poe shows in his "Perl 6 For Mere Mortals" presentation.

My intention wasn't to make people say "wow, I know Perl 5 but now I'll never figure out Perl 6," but rather to illustrate some new features in the context of a familiar example. :) In fact, the above-mentioned presentation introduces P6 features by gradually expanding upon P5 code, showing that you can gradually grow into the language.

Estragon• 11 years ago

Why would I learn this rather than Haskell?

muraiki6• 11 years ago

Oh, I'm a big fan of Haskell! It's definitely a language worth learning. However, if you want a pretty nice but still "dynamic feeling" (as opposed to Java-ish) object system, Perl 6 has you covered there. I'd look at P6 as similar to Scala in that it mixes both OO and FP ideas, but with P6 leaning more towards the OO side than the FP side, with not as much type safety as Haskell/Scala/OCaml but with more type safety than, say, Clojure.

If you're familiar with another OO dynamic language like Perl 5, Python, or Ruby, you can probably get up to speed more quickly in P6 than Haskell, and you can gradually introduce more advanced P6 ideas as your ability grows.

But yeah, I'd still recommend you learn Haskell... and Erlang, and Lisp... and...

kachnuv_ocasek• 11 years ago

Why not learn both? Realistically speaking, though, it might be easier to land a job with Haskell than with Perl 6.

wantarray6• 11 years ago

Why would I learn this rather than Haskell?

You wouldn't.

That is to say: You might learn Haskell if you want do write 100% functional code, and Perl 6 if you want to write imperative/procedural/OO code with functional idioms mixed in here and there (in places where that facilitates a more elegant approach).

I.e. the two languages are not really competing in the same category.

Even though Perl 6 has first-class code objects, closure semantics, basic pattern-matching, lazy lists, immutable data types, and so on, a lot of the syntax and default behaviors are geared towards stateful programming styles, which - combined with the lack of static typing - means that strictly sticking to functional programming in Perl 6 will be awkward and you'd be better off using a dedicated functional language if that's what you want.

perlgeek12• 11 years ago

Coming from other dynamic and mostly OO/imperative languages, Perl 6 is evolution, and Haskell is revolution.

If you think that you need a revolution to get to a desirable state, Haskell is for you. If you prefer not to have to re-wire your brain, give Perl 6 a shot.

Or, of course, do both :-)

JadeNB• 11 years ago

I can't find it right now, but I like how this harks back to the original announcement that Perl 6 would be ready in time for Christmas—just with no commitment to which Christmas.

chromatic19• 11 years ago

This original announcement, which said "18 to 24 months, with a prerelease targeted for [July 2001]"?

http://use.perl.org/use.perl.org/articled5d3.html?sid=00/07/...

FROGGS• 11 years ago

And at that point they found out that Perl 6 will be a complete rewrite and not just a cleaned up Perl 5. I also guess that the Second System feeling already arrived in some minds, the problem IMO is more that the 'by Christmas' joke has been kept alive for so many years, without specifying a year.

mfrager2• 11 years ago

I hope Perl 6 has better runtime speed and memory efficiency because those are the only downsides of Perl 5. However I seriously doubt that will be the case. Perl 6 will most likely be more bloated and slow, but I very much hope that I'm wrong.

Just for reference my company's software is all built with Perl 5 and runs great. Most of the execution time is within the database calls so there is no impact from using Perl over a marginally faster runtime like Python or Java.

rurban• 11 years ago

With perl5 + Moose, perl6 beats perl5. In startup time and run time. With simple small scripts the small startup footprint of perl5 still elevates it over perl6.

perl6 has much more features than perl5, it's a completely different world. I wouldn't call that bloat.

pwr223• 11 years ago

Wonder how Moo compares?

SwellJoe3• 11 years ago

When did Python become faster than Perl 5?

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but the last realistic comparisons I did had Perl running quite a bit faster. For example comparing ack to grin, which are very similar projects in Perl and Python respectively...at the time, admittedly several years ago, ack was an order of magnitude faster than grin. I also wrote a few log parsers in both Perl and Python (at a time when I was working in a Python shop, so they preferred everything be done in Python). The Perl parsers were much faster than the Python variant, for exactly the same work (again, an order of magnitude difference). Perhaps this is just an example of Perl's domain of expertise...processing text is a big part of its origin story, and has always been a big part of what people use it for. Or, perhaps Python has made remarkable performance improvements in those intervening years. I haven't worked with Python in that time, so haven't followed development. Perl 5 has gotten faster in that time, too, though, so I'd be surprised if Python is dramatically faster for the same real world tasks.

latk• 11 years ago

Perl5 has a lot of historical baggage that makes certain things difficult to do efficiently. For example, how objects work. There is an insane amount of indirection involved for a simple method call, and this indirection can't generally be removed if we want Perl5 to stay highly backwards-compatible. Numerics aren't particularly efficient either. Perl5's opcodes are very high-level. That makes each individual opcode pretty fast, but makes it difficult to inline stuff. Variables can have “magic” attached that can change their semantics substantially. While this is very flexible and allows to do some amazing things, this also requires this magic to be checked on each access. So Perl5 has a lot of features that rank high on “clever”, but low on “can be optimized”. Perl5 never got JIT support, and only has a couple of very experimental Perl-to-C transpilers.

What is fast is string handling and log mangling. Perl was created for that; everything else is bolted on.

pekk2• 11 years ago

Wow, pre-congratulations! Let's hope this inspires some renewal in the Perl community.

It never made any sense to me that some people would rather see Perl stagnate and die and complain from the peanut gallery than they would help it move forward.

chromatic19• 11 years ago

some people would rather ... complain from the peanut gallery than they would help it move forward.

That's not entirely fair. Some of us doubters spent a lot of time, energy, and resources trying to help it move forward before deciding it wasn't worth it.

kbenson13• 11 years ago

Have you been checking it out at all again, or are you considering it? It's been my secret hope for a long time that you would get involved again, if not at the compiler level then at the community and ecosystem level. Your blog[1] was always insightful and a good read, and I think the community is worse without it being active. I'm talking about Perl 6 here, but I could say the same for Perl 5 and it would be at least as true.

1: http://modernperlbooks.com/

pekk2• 11 years ago

I'm interested in why you removed "stagnate and die" from that quote.

The problem I described is when people actually prefer to kill a project through stagnation than to help it move forward - often by active resistance to any real change. Living projects periodically change. Even goals like improving speed often require redesigns and replacements of old components. When the process of change and renewal is shut down or nobody contributes to it, everyone starts wandering off and the project dies.

I'm not a developer of Perl. I'm sure all your input was appreciated by someone. It's a personal decision whether you want to keep putting in that effort, or switch to other tools. I just don't see any sense in attacking Perl 6 any more.

lawnchair_larry• 11 years ago

Ugh, I hoped we had all moved past perl.

cwyers3• 11 years ago

It says a lot about the history here that Perl 6 gets a 1.0 release, not a 6.0.

eCa• 11 years ago

That is because it is version 1.0 of Perl 6. The '6' is not a version: 'Perl 6' is the name of the language.

Meanwhile, Perl 5 will have its 22.0 release this May.

cwyers3• 11 years ago

People can say that as much as they like, calling the thing that comes after Perl 5 "Perl 6" certainly SOUNDS like a version number, and the reason it sounds like it's supposed to be a new version of Perl is because once upon a time it was going to be.

smegel• 11 years ago

They are seriously running the "done by Christmas" line again? They are holding us in contempt.

melling• 11 years ago

"Perl 6 Developers will attempt to make a development release of Version 1.0"

We are upvoting non-news? It'll be a great announcement if they ship it, but it's just hype now. Also, consider all they are announcing is a version for developers.

kbenson13• 11 years ago

That's not what it says:

"Larry has announced that the Perl 6 Developers will attempt to make a development release of Version 1.0 of Perl 6.0 in time for his 61st Birthday this year and a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015."

perlgeek12• 11 years ago

I'm a Perl 6 core developer (compiler, test suite, docs, design documents, infrastructure). Ask me anything :-)

xiaq• 11 years ago

IIRC the new VM (MoarVM) is around for quite a short time and it replaced Parrot in a dramatically short time. What are the advantages of MoarVM over Parrot and why were we stuck at Parrot for so long before giving it up?

brrt6• 11 years ago

I'm the developer of the MoarVM JIT (but not the developer of the MoarVM bytecode specialisation framework, which is typically seen as part of the JIT).

The weakness of Parrot VM was it's ambition - to be an efficient VM for all dynamic languages. This may have seemed possible in the past but recent work (i.e. v8, luajit2, etc) has invalidated that; it's much better (and much easier) to build a VM for a specific target than for all possible targets, as there are simply fewer points where you need abstraction. (For instance, NaN is false in javascript boolean context, but not in Perl6). More importantly, MoarVM has been designed and developed by a small set of developers applying all the lessons learned from parrot, while parrot was in many ways an experiment by committee.

perlgeek12• 11 years ago

What are the advantages of MoarVM over Parrot

Mostly that MoarVM developers could learn from all of Parrot's successes and mistakes, while not carrying any of the historical baggage. That means cleaner design, less memory footprint, faster execution.

and why were we stuck at Parrot for so long before giving it up?

Rakudo works on Parrot. Why drop support for it?

Once you frame the question that way, the answer becomes obvious: because there hasn't been big changes to the code generation yet that would make continued parrot support painful. Once we reach that point, the situation will be reconsidered.

RichardCA2• 11 years ago

I don't see anywhere where it says the project is getting behind MoarVM, and this will be the official runtime that ships. Is this in fact the case?

kbenson13• 11 years ago

Perl 6 is a spec, and different implementations are possible and encouraged. Rakudo is an implementation, and targets a few different VMs, including Parrot, MoarVM and the JVM. A lot of effort is being put into making MoarVM a good VM for the intermediate language that Rakudo uses to implement Perl 6, but AFAIK the JVM is kept up to date as well, and Parrot is also where time and expertise exist.

perlgeek12• 11 years ago

Most everybody on the #perl6 IRC channel, the central part of the Perl 6 community, is preferring the MoarVM backend. It's only a matter of time and policy until it becomes more "official" in one way or another than the other backends.

insertion• 11 years ago

Looking at the release as a whole, I'd be fascinated to hear what features have taken the most time and effort? What turned out to be much harder than expected?

perlgeek12• 11 years ago

One big challenge is the sweet spot between flexibility and optimizability. Perl 6 is designed for extensibility, and yet we know at compile time where a given subroutine will dispatch to.

Getting the right trade-offs there was no easy task.

Another challenge was how to make the type system and built-in types so that stuff works intuitively for a Perl programmer, and still has sane rules in the type system.

Finally a thing that's surprisingly tricky is precompilation. You need to serialize types and objects, and then another compilation unit comes, and needs to modify something, so it claims ownership over a piece of serialized data or code. There are way too many nasty corner cases in that area.

DougHaber3• 11 years ago

Forgive me for this, but why is it still called Perl 6?

I've been a professional Perl developer for a long time, and I've followed Perl 6 since the first announcements. There is some impressive and really interesting work going on there, but from my perspective it seems to be a new language rather than a new version of Perl. I fully support the development of Perl 6, but I really wish the name would change to something that doesn't involve Perl.

It seems like the usage of the name "Perl" has actually done a fair amount of damage to the Perl 5 language, and the Perl community. Non-Perl programmers don't understand what is happening. To them, Perl 6 is just the next version of Perl, and the long wait for Perl 6 is a sign of problems within the Perl community. To many of them when Perl 6 comes out it will be the obvious choice to use for new projects, since the name implies it is the new version, even though the reality is that Perl 5 will likely be the correct choice for a large number of new projects for many years to come.

Perl has become a punching bag by the uninformed who speak about it as a dying, irrelevant, read-only language. Perl 6 carrying the Perl name has helped reinforce those views, allowing them to incorrectly speak of the lack of new versions, the future versions breaking backwards compatibility, and many of the changes being a strong admission that something was very wrong with Perl 5. When Perl 6 is released there will be a lot of confusion and the common belief will become that Perl 5 is even more irrelevant.

So, why not stop using the name "Perl" and call it something different? Wouldn't it be better for everyone if Perl 6 was regarded as a new and separate language?

perlgeek12• 11 years ago

I've been a professional Perl developer for a long time, and I've followed Perl 6 since the first announcements. There is some impressive and really interesting work going on there, but from my perspective it seems to be a new language rather than a new version of Perl.

It's both, really. If you use it (and after a while of getting used it), it just feels like perl.

I fully support the development of Perl 6, but I really wish the name would change to something that doesn't involve Perl.

Well, in retrospect, it might have been a good idea to name it something else entirely. But that's too late now, and nobody has been able to come up with a good new name anyway. And the "Perl" brand is still very strong, so we are loath to give it up.

Finally, Perl 5 has many unsolved problems that will hinder its evolution in the upcoming decades. Once Perl 6 has become as fast and mature as Perl 5 is now, we want to provide the future that's closed to Perl 5.

chrisseaton2• 11 years ago

Some of the presentations I've seen make it look like MoarVM does some kind of AST specialisation before it gets to the JIT. Is there any documentation of how that works?

perlgeek12• 11 years ago

Not that I'm aware of, sorry.

Some of things it does:

* type specialization. It looks at repeated executions of a piece of code, and if the type of a variable or parameter is stable, it assumes it'll be always that way, and specializes the code for that (for example, always picks a method from the same class). And of course it inserts a guard clause to ensure that if the type should change, it takes the slow (but correct) path

* inlining

* container removal. In Perl 6, things generally become mutable by being inside a container (think pointer), and if the specializer finds cases where that's not needed, it generates better code for them

* reachability analysis and elimination of allocations are being worked on, iirc.

dodyg• 11 years ago

How flexible is the subset type functionality in Perl 6?

perlgeek12• 11 years ago

It allows arbitrary code to define the subset. So it's very flexible, but it also means that compiler usually can't be clever about subsets. We can't solve the Halting problem for you.

raiph4• 11 years ago

Make sure you also look at the design document section titled "Multiple constraints":

http://design.perl6.org/S12.html#Multiple_constraints

It concludes with:

As a first approximation for 6.0.0, subsets of enums are static, and other subsets are dynamic. We may refine this in subsequent versions of Perl.

ars• 11 years ago

What are the risks still left? What things might happen/not happen that would prevent release on this schedule?

Or in other words what is still left to do that is not just routine work, but actually might not be possible (or not possible in the timeframe)?

Or in even more informal language, what's the holdup? :)

xaa• 11 years ago

I'm also interested in an answer to this question. Perl 6, as a feature set, looks awesome and I'd really consider replacing my use of Python with it, espcially because of the gradual typing and fast startup time (assuming Perl 6 follows Perl 5 in this regard; my initial experiments haven't been encouraging though).

In general, I think there's huge latent demand for a relatively fast, "next-gen" scripting language, as even Python is showing its age in terms of the programming styles it doesn't support, and has no plans to.

Will it really be released by the end of this year? Obviously the history of this project induces a healthy bit of skepticism. My two cents would be that the dev team should just release it next week and fix the inevitable warts gradually.

On a related note, should I, as someone who does not know Perl, bother learning Perl 6 yet? Or is it likely to change a lot before release?

perlgeek12• 11 years ago

As always in open source projects, there's the risk that a major contributor might drop out.

Barring that, there are three major technical things we want to tackle before the release: native, shaped arrays (compact storage of arrays/matrices of machine-sized types), the Great List Refactoring (GLR; mostly about speeding up list iteration and making things more consistent), and some Unicode-related tasks.

Any of those might prove more difficult than expected. I personally see the biggest risk in the list refactoring, because lists are rather central to the language as a whole.

kbd2• 11 years ago

Something I've wondered for a while: why was the decision made to write yet another dynamic language VM+JIT (MoarVM) instead of taking advantage of all the work the PyPy folks have done and using PyPy for Perl 6? Was PyPy even evaluated as a possible target?

xaduha• 11 years ago

http://irclog.perlgeek.de/moarvm/search/?nick=&q=pypy http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/search/?nick=&q=pypy

I think that the initial port of Rakudo to JVM was done by jnthn single-handedly. I don't know how PyPy compares with JVM though.

b2gills2• 11 years ago

Why would we want to write Python code to get a new Perl6 backend which doesn't have quite the same object system that Perl6 needs?

At any rate I think that an implementation of 6model (the basis for Perl6 objects) on PyPy would likely be too slow to really make it worth the effort. ( If you really want to try I'm sure there are People who would help you )

There are currently 3 backends for the Rakudo implementation of Perl6: Parrot, JVM, and Moar.

The fastest one currently is the one designed to meet the needs of Rakudo: MoarVM. (in many benchmarks) It of course makes sense that a VM designed for Perl6 would work better for Perl6.

bonif2• 11 years ago

I got my first job in 2000 because I knew Perl. Perl 6 was coming. Fast forward .. 15 years have passed.. Please stop insulting us ...

brrt6• 11 years ago

Why is this insulting to you? Things happen at their natural pace :-). I got my first job knowing a bit of PHP. It's still not a pretty language, but I don't find that insulting.

caoilte• 11 years ago

Give them a chance. Duke Nukem Forever came out eventually, after all.

wolfgke• 11 years ago

But not GNU Hurd.

vacri• 11 years ago

And what a disappointment that was. It turned out that DNF was socially more valuable as vapourware than as the actual product.

jackmaney• 11 years ago

I have a fondness for Perl 5, as it was the first general-use programming language in which I became proficient. But let's not kid ourselves: Perl 6 is the Half Life 3 of programming languages.

lisa_henderson• 11 years ago

No joke, this time Charlie Brown is really, really, really going to kick that football.

runn1ng• 11 years ago

Yes, Virgina, there really is a Santa Claus.

pcunite• 11 years ago

The first line of code I ever wrote was in Basic. It was copying something in a book. Then I wrote routines on a Ti calculator for school. Then I found Perl. I felt all grown up! Maybe, just maybe I could be a "real" programmer. Thank you Perl.

Perl 6 developers will attempt to make a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015

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