Getting Involved with Perl 6

[moritz]

The other day I stumbled about Get involved with Pugs, and thought about writing something similar, and a bit more up-to-date, for Perl 6 in general.

So how and where can you help?

There are different implementations, and helping them requires different skills. And you can help with the infrastructure, without knowing anything about building compilers.

Pugs

Limbic~Region++ wrote Get involved with Pugs, which is still true

Parrot

If you are a C coder, help the Parrot folks to advance their great virtual machine, that will once host Perl 6 - and already does.

Even if you are not confident with C, you can help: you can review the PDDs (Parrot Design Documents) for ambiguous sentences. Ask on #parrot on irc.perl.org for more details

Perl 6 on Parrot

When I told you that Parrot already hosted Perl 6, I was referring to the Perl 6 on Parrot-Implementation that lives in languages/perl6/ of the Parrot SVN repository.

It is mostly written in PIR, and uses the Parrot Grammar Engine for parsing.

It passes basic test cases, and is really exciting to work on.

Again, if you are interested, ask on the parrot IRC channel what to do.

KindaPerl6 (kp6)

kp6 lives in the Pugs repository under v6/v6-KindaPerl6/, and is written in MiniPerl6, a subset of Perl 6.

MiniPerl6 is bootstrapped to perl 5, and the most active kp6 backend is the perl 5 one as well.

If you feel like coding p5 or p6, this is the place to go. There is a roadmap (HTML / POD) waiting for you.

Ask fglock on #perl6 on irc.freenode.org for details.

STD.pm and Prelude

If you want to do some serious perl6 hacking in Perl 6, you might want to hack Perl-6.0.0-STD.pm and Prelude.pm in http://svn.pugscode.org/pugs/src/perl6/ in the pugs repository.

STD.pm is the standard Perl 6 grammar that will eventually be used by all implementations.

In Prelude.pm you can find p6 implementations of builtin functions/methods/classes/roles, currently meant to be used by pugs, but in future other implementations will use it.

Again, ask on #perl6 for more informations.

Infrastructure

As promised, there are things you can do without knowing how to build a compiler:

• Tend the official test suite
• Write summaries for perl6-language (the mailing list)
• Read and write on the mailing lists and IRC channels. Sometimes the developers just want to discuss something, you don't need to be a wizard to be usefull
• In #perl6 there is pugs evalbot, but we want more evalbots (for kp6 and Perl 6 on Parrot). You could help there.
• Read and proofread the synopsis for consistency.
• Port p5 modules to p6.
• Write tutorials for beginners.

(Update: Typo spotted by L~R)

[Limbic~Region]

moritz,
See also:
• Perl6 Community Development Server
• Why aren't you using Perl 6 yet?
• Yet Another Way To Get Involved With Perl6
This list is not exhaustive and some are probably dated. They are just threads of a similar vein that I have participated in previously and could remember.