Perl 6 has several compilers and interpreters, and none is called "official Perl 6". Larry Wall has explained that anything that passes the test suite is Perl 6. So far several partial implementations exist. With their feedback, the Synopses and test suite that form the language specification are evolving. This page is about software that can parse Perl 6, not VMs or runloops.

• Rakudo is currently the most feature-rich and the most actively developed implementation. It runs on Parrot, a virtual machine for many dynamic languages.

• Pugs was the leading implementation from 2005 until about 2007. It runs on GHC Haskell and helped to develop the test suite.

• viv is a derivation of STD.pm for testing and bootstrapping purposes. A utility called "gimme5" creates viv by translating STD.pm into Perl 5. This is possible because Larry very carefully wrote STD.pm in a translatable subset of Perl 6.

• vill bridges STD to the LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine) compiler tools

• Mildew is a Perl 5 based compiler that embeds viv, and can emit code for several runtime engines, including JavaScript and SMOP.

• Sprixel started out with viv as the source code parser and Google's V8 JavaScript engine as a runtime interpreter. Currently Sprixel is undergoing a complete rewrite. The future Sprixel will probably be written in C# and will run on Mono and the .NET Framework. It will include its own regex engine and Perl 6 grammar parser.

• Elf is a compiler written in Perl 6 with Perl 5 and Lisp backends.

• Perlito, formerly known as MP6 (mini Perl 6), is a Perl 6 subset build by Flavio Glock for bootstrap purposes.

• KindaPerl6 (kp6)

• v6 is a source filter for Perl 5.

Historical Implementations are definitively closed projects.