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<b>Update, Oct 2014:</b> Concurrency in P6 has developed a long way since I wrote this post. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhCx3CTauBY|This video] briefly runs through the Functional Programming paradigm features that have been implemented, including Promises, before discussing the latest Object Oriented paradigm work, including Monitors, Actors, and Evject.
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<a href="http://6guts.wordpress.com/2013/07/15/rakudo-jvm-news-more-tests-plus-thread-and-promise-prototypes/">Thread and Promise prototypes in Perl 6.</a>
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Some background:
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Evidently <b>the time has come to fully develop concurrency and parallelism features in Perl 6</b>.
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The Perl 6 language design team led by Larry Wall has discussed concurrency and parallelism for over a decade. So <b>every element of the P6 language has been considered in the light of concurrency and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK19vSU9A5Y">parallelism</a></b>, from variable assignment on up. But that's just design.
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There's also been implementation work done. However, Rakudo (the leading P6 compiler) has surfaced very little of this work (gather/take is about it) and while Niecza (another compiler) has long exposed continuations, coroutines, and threads, Niecza's author Stefan O'Rear basically stopped working on Niecza a year ago. (Imo this is good news; read on.)
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Until recently the Rakudo compiler only worked on one backend, the Parrot VM. While it supports concurrency, <b>Parrot's support has never been considered reliable enough by the Rakudo team for them to develop more of the concurrency features in Rakudo</b>.
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Recently the Rakudo team began porting it to work on the JVM. One of the primary motivations claimed was to unblock development of concurrency and parallelism features.
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Starting at YAPC::NA 2013, <b>at the start of June, Stefan O'Rear began working on the JVM port</b>. In the last week or so he made JVM concurrency primitives available to NQP, which is what's needed to implement them in Rakudo. And thus, <a href="http://6guts.wordpress.com/2013/07/15/rakudo-jvm-news-more-tests-plus-thread-and-promise-prototypes/">in the last few days, jnthn published an initial prototype</a>. It already looks promising...
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<div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-698487">
<a href="http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1041369">the celebrity tell-all of the Perl-6 cult</a>
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