Ask HN: Perl 6 looks interesting. But what's the current status?

8 points

16 years ago

Last night I read the open source perl6 book and played some with it. It definitely looks different and more expressive compared to the languages in the same league - perl5, python and ruby.

Changes to regex and rules & tokens make pattern matching pleasant. Grammars bring formal parsing to mainstream. The perl6 OOP way looks promising.

But on the other hand, the status page doesn't say anything meaningful - http://dev.perl.org/perl6/status.html. The wiki shows timelines only till 2007 - http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?when_will_perl_6_be_released

I can't find any information about using existing cpan modules with Perl6 or a replacement; I did stumble upon a mailing thread about perl5to6 conversion tool or something.

So, overall, what's the time-frame we are looking at when perl6 can safely be used for a new project? It looks like north of 2 years to me.

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