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 about Perl 6 in general, explore the Documentation.
• want to help Perl 6 be released faster, read about Getting Involved, Perl 6 Donations and Fundraising, and Perl 6 Sponsors and Supporters (Thanks!!).
• 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

Some links on this page occur in more than one location to make finding relevant things easier and more likely, although this requires some extra effort when updating this page. ("There's more than one way to find it.")

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.)
• Perl 6 People (Sponsors and supporters, plus who is doing what, who is interested in what, potential collaborators, etc.)

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 show up on Planet Parrot and at Rakudo.org (see Rakudo.org headlines at the bottom of this page).
• When will Perl 6 be released? (Maybe something by this Christmas, if you and enough other people help out: see Getting Involved, Perl 6 Donations and Fundraising, 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 (TIMTOWTDI!)
• Pugs (Perl 6 compiler implemented in Haskell.)
• Run Perl 6 Now (Runs Pugs in a browser.)
• QuickStart (Easy, near-instant gratification — instructions for downloading and running your first Pugs program.)
• 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.)
• DistributionFormat

Downloads

• Download Perl 6 (Yield to temptation!)
• Download Pugs (Haskell-based Perl 6 compiler with multiple back ends.)
• QuickStart (Easy, near-instant gratification — instructions for downloading and running your first Pugs program.)
• Run Perl 6 Now (No download needed: this runs Pugs in your browser.)
• Download Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot.)

Documentation and Other Information

• General Documentation overview (Current synopses, cookbook, Perl 6 code examples and test suites, etc.)
• The Official Documents that describe Perl 6 (The official specification documents, frequently updated with section-specific test statistics.)
• Installable Perl 6 Docs (A CPAN module of the P6 docs.)
• Glossary of Perl 6 Terms and Jargon ("-Ofun", IRC and newsgroup slang, "Perl 6" versus "perl6".)
• Perl Tablets (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 for running Pugs.)
• Perl 6 Articles and Presentations
• Introduction to Perl 6 (Course slides with many examples; a work-in-progress.)
• Perl 6 microarticles (The "Yet another Perl 6 operator" YAP6 series and more.)
• Perl 6 Newsgroup Threads of Interest (Stuff that may not yet be well-known or well-documented elsewhere yet.)
• Perl 6 Books and Media (Both existing and planned.)
• Larry Wall's Talks (Postmodern design theory and other forms of ingenius pramatism, plus the State of the Onion series.)
• Perl 6 People (Sponsors and supporters, plus who is doing what, who is interested in what, potential collaborators, etc.)
• Anti-FUD (Some non-ballistic responses.)

Additional information

• Mail Lists, IRC, Archives (Developer and user hotlines, plus logs and archives.)
• Getting Involved (Help hack on 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.)
• Perl 6 Donations and Fundraising (Help hack on the Perl 6 ecosystem.)

About This Wiki

• About This Wiki (License and other info.)
• Wiki 101 (How you can work on this Wiki.)
• 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 Outlets

• Perl 6 Articles and Presentations lists recent (and historical) articles, presentations, and blog posts of interest.
• Perl 6 and Parrot links accumulates links to major Perl 6 and Parrot news items (perl6.cz wiki).
• The Perl Review is published quarterly (both in print and PDF).
• The Perl Foundation announces Perl 6 grants, etc.
• Perl 6 RSS News Feeds is a convenient all-in-1 auto-generated current list of the most recent articles from all of these sites:
• Planet Perl Six aggregates many Perl 6 blogs. (Note: see last section below for an auto-generated list of the latest contents.)
• Planet Parrot aggregates many Parrot blogs (and carries the weekly Perl 6 design meeting minutes).
• Perl.com often carries Perl 6 articles.
• Perlbuzz often carries Perl 6 news.
• Rakudo.org carries Rakudo Perl (Perl 6 on Parrot) news (and carries the weekly Perl 6 design meeting minutes).
• Planet Perl mostly carries Perl 5 news, but Perl 6 news items are becoming more frequent.
• Parrot Blog started off with Parrot and related tools tutorial series, plus carries other useful info.

Latest Planet Perl 6 and Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot) Postings

The current lists below are auto-generated when you load this page.

(This line prevents the wiki from sometimes double-spacing above lines. Have no idea why.)