Rakudo Rocks

Ok, we all knew that Rakudo (for the casual reader: the Perl 6 compiler based on Parrot) rocks. You probably knew the regularly updated progress graph already that tells us how many tests Rakudo passes.

You hopefully also read Carl Mäsak's use.perl.org blog, where he tells you about a lot of nasty bugs, but at the same is quite enthusiastic.

If you ever wrote a grammar with Rakudo, you know that feeling very well - it's so nice that it actually works.

Man, we have parametric roles, Junctions autothread over user-defined functions, grammars and regexes are in place, the most important control structures, exceptions, you name it.

The other day I did some charts, and found something interesting: Rakudo passes 700 more test each month, on average. Since May 2008. Really.

The chart shows the number of passing tests over the number of days since 2008-05-22, the start of our records. The red, dashed line is what we call a "regression", a line that is drawn in such a way that the squared distance to the actual graph is as small as possible. It's calculated by the plotting program xmgrace, which also gave me the magic equation by which the line was drawn:

y = 394.15 + 23.071 * x

That basically means that the offset on the left is 394, and 23 new tests pass every day - on average. If you multiply that number by 30, the days in month, you'll get 692 new tests per month (or 715 if your month has 31 days).