Welcome to the Official Perl 6 Wiki

(Also see the Official Parrot Wiki and the Official Perl 5 Wiki.)

Perl 6 is the "Super-Perl" successor of Perl 5

• "We're really serious about reinventing everything that needs reinventing." — Larry Wall (2000).
• "The Perl 6 design process is about keeping what works in Perl 5, fixing what doesn't, and adding what's missing. That means there will be a few fundamental changes to the language, a large number of extensions to existing features, and a handful of completely new ideas. These modifications, enhancements, and innovations will work together to make the future Perl even more insanely great...." — Damian Conway (2003).
• "Perl 6 and Parrot have some extremely ambitious goals, and it’s my belief that the value and impact of our hard work and patience is going to play out for a very long time — that is, over at least many decades." — Patrick Michaud (2006).

First Look Shortcuts

If you ...

• are curious, read What is Perl 6?, Learn About Perl 6, and The Long Perl 6 Super-Feature List.
• want to learn abou Perl 6 in general, explore the Documentation.
• want to help Perl 6 be released faster, read about Getting Involved and Perl 6 Sponsors and Supporters.
• want to talk to developers about Perl 6, read Mail Lists, IRC, Archives about IRC channel #perl6.
• want to read the latest Perl 6 news, see the Perl 6 News section below, or see the combined Perl 6 RSS News Feeds.
• are interested in Perl 6 books, products, services, jobs, etc., see Perl 6 Books and Media and the Perl 6 Marketplace.

Main Sections

Introduction

• Learn About Perl 6 (What it is, articles, anti-FUD, etc.)
• The Long Perl 6 Super-Feature List (Perl 6++! "All Your Paradigms Are Belong To Us." :-)
• Run Perl 6 Now (Play with Perl 6 in your browser, right now! No installation needed. Based on Pugs.)
• Glossary of Perl 6 Terms and Jargon ("-Ofun", IRC and newsgroup slang, "Perl 6" versus "perl6".)
• Larry Wall's Talks (Postmodern design theory and other forms of ingenius pramatism, plus the State of the Onion series.)
• Perl 6 Articles and Presentations (The pace is definitely picking up.)

Development Status

• What Can I do with Perl 6 Today (Also see Run Perl 6 Now to run Pugs in a browser.)
• The "weekly Perl 6 design meeting" minutes are posted to chromatic's journal, and then show up on Planet Parrot.
• When will Perl 6 be released? (Maybe something by this Christmas, if you and enough other people help out: see Getting Involved and Perl 6 Sponsors and Supporters.)
• Development Dashboard (Perl 6 project status and plans.)
• STATUS file in languages/perl6 (Links to the Parrot svn.)
• State of the Onion (Larry Wall's yearly Perl status reports, with much humor-infested commentary on Perl 6 design philosophy, processes, and illuminating insights.)

Implementations

• Perl 6 implementations (TMTOWTDI!)
• Pugs (Perl 6 compiler implemented in Haskell.)
• Run Perl 6 Now (Runs Pugs in a browser.)
• KindaPerl6 (A bootstrapping Perl 6 compiler with multiple emitter backends.)
• Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot; Parrot is a virtual machine for dynamic languages, especially including Perl 6.)
• Perl 6 for Perl 5 (Including Perl 5.10, Perl 6-ish modules, etc.)
• SMOP (Simplistic Meta Object Programming / Small Matter Of Programming: a non-VM C runtime engine for running Perl 6.)
• Perl 6 People (Sponsors and supporters, plus who is doing what, who is interested in what, potential collaborators, etc.)

Downloads

• Download Perl 6 (Yield to temptation!)
• Download Pugs
• Download Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot.)

Documentation

• General Documentation (Current synopses, cookbook, Perl 6 code examples and test suites, etc.)
• The Official Documents that describe Perl 6 (Mostly developer-oriented specification documents.)
• Installable Perl 6 Docs (A CPAN module of the P6 docs.)
• Perl Table (Soon-to-be the big, all-in-one tutorial with index, tables, and comparisons.)
• WITCH ("What Is This Character Here" is a useful symbolic index of Perl 6 symbols and operators.)
• FAQ (Another great resource.)
• QuickStart (Easy, near-instant gratification.)
• Introduction to Perl 6 (Course slides with many examples; a work-in-progress.)
• Perl 6 Articles and Presentations
• Perl 6 microarticles (The "Yet another Perl 6 operator" YAP6 series and more.)
• Perl 6 Newsgroup Threads of Interest.
• Perl 6 Books and Media.
• FUD (Some non-ballistic responses.)

Additional information

• Mail Lists, IRC, Archives (Developer and user hotlines, plus logs and archives.)
• Getting Involved (Help hack Perl 6, or write new test cases, or work on docs.)
• Related Projects (CPAN6, PITA, and more.)
• Perl 6 Marketplace (Products, services, jobs, and so on.)

About This Wiki

• About This Wiki (License and other info.)
• Wiki 101
• What Goes On This Wiki?
• What Does Not Go On This Wiki?
• Content Wanted (More, more, more, and still more.)
• Discuss this website (Posting to perl6.users is more likely to get useful attention.)

Perl 6 News

• The Perl Foundation announces Perl 6 grants, etc.
• Perl 6 and Parrot links accumulates major Perl 6 and Parrot news items (perl6.cz wiki).
• The Perl Review is published quarterly (both in print and PDF).
• Perl 6 RSS News Feeds is a convenient all-in-1 list of the most recent articles from all of these sites:
• Planet Perl Six aggregates many Perl 6 blogs: the latest contents appear at the end of this page.
• Planet Parrot aggregates many Parrot blogs (and carries the weekly Perl 6 design meeting minutes).
• Planet Perl mostly carries Perl 5 news, but Perl 6 news items are becomming more frequent.
• Perl.com often carries Perl 6 articles.
• Perlbuzz often carries Perl 6 news.