This week I’ve been experimenting a little with Perl 6. It began as a quick question on IRC and somehow I ended up writing sample scripts in Perl 6. This week I ported the regex-dna benchmark to Perl 6, and I intend to port a few others. You can download it here.
One thing that’s new about Perl 6 is that it is a specification, similar to C, C++ and Java. Any product that meets the spec and passes the test suite can be called Perl 6 (there are many C compilers, and none of them is “the official C compiler”).
The implementation I have been experimenting with is Rakudo (compiler written in Perl 6 and Parrot assembly language) which seems to be the most active and the most complete. You can already write some Perl 6 programs with the Rakudo compiler. There is a wiki called November, a board game called druid, and a few others. Other notable implementations include Pugs (interpreter written in Haskell) and SMOP (interpreter written in C).
