Hacking on Perl 6

Hacking on the VM (Parrot)

See the Official Parrot Wiki section on "Contributing to parrot".

Hacking on the compiler and related tasks

If you haven't already, Download Perl 6 to prepare. The Perl 6 Community Development Server provides free accounts for Perl 6 development.

Reading material for Pugs hackers

Besides these links, the Pugs distribution also provides README, READTHEM and READTOO.

• Pugs Apocryphon 1 Overview of the Pugs project.
• Doing Pugs-related development.
• A Peek Into Pugs Internals
• German language notes about compiling Pugs

General Perl 6 tasks

A running list of tasks to work in kept in the repo at TASKS. It's a catch-all list. Something on it is bound to match your skill set!

A specific test to help with is Smart Linking.

Perl 6 tasks for Perl 6 programmers

Preludification Candidates discusses parts of Perl 6 that can be written in Perl 6.

There's also plenty to do related to the test suite, which is written in Perl 6. The most urgent need now is test suite refactoring.
See t/TASKS for other work to do there.

You might also be interested to Start Your Own Perl 6 Module, or work one of the existing ones. (You might also want to check out CPAN6.)

Hacking the Perl 6 docs

In general, offical docs are stored in docs/Perl6 and docs/Pugs in POD format, and they are fair game to improve directly. The exception is most of the documents in docs/Perl6/Spec which is the official Perl 6 specification. Improvements to the official spec should be suggested to the perl6-language list.

• The README for would-be Pugs documentation contributors
• The evil plan. This mentions many things you can do to help out with docs, although it is a bit dated.
• A current task that needs help with filling out the Spec for IPC, IO and Signals. As a starting point, a lot of functions could just use the official Perl 5 docs copy/pasted in.
• Perl 6 Tables All in one Tutorial, linked and indexed. (English version just started.) It always needs help: write chapters, updates, fix typos.
• A central place for relevant introductions, tutorials, specifications is the Perl6::Doc Module, which also installs the p6doc commandline viewer; expect to see more content here in the near future.:
• (http://www.annocpan.org/~LICHTKIND/Perl6-Doc/lib/Perl6/Doc.pm),
• (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Perl6-Doc/lib/Perl6/Doc.pm).

Other Ways to Help

Work on this wiki

See About This Wiki.

Donate computers for test and development systems

Anything reasonable would probably be helpful somewhere. There's a shortage of Windows PCs for Parrot testing at the moment (see What You Test Changes How You Test).

Fundraising and networking

Anything you could do in the way of fundraising and soliciting $$$ to support Perl 6 and Parrot development would be wonderful. See Perl 6 Sponsors and Supporters.)

Every year, people, companies, and foundations give numerous multi-million donations to universities for new buildings, new faculty, and so on. Perl 6 is at least as important, and will have far greater ultimate techno-economic leverage in the great majority of cases. (Also, don't just think about Perl 6.0 — you want to establish major momentum to carry on through Perl 6.2, Perl 6.4, and so on — including the production of a growing series of CPAN6 power modules.)