Lots of momentum in the Perl 6 community

Usually I try to tell you something intelligent about Perl 6, but this night's frustrating hours of debugging very simple mistakes demonstrated that my wits have left to 90% at least. Still there's the Iron man blogging challenge, so I'll write a few lines about something entirely subjective.

I've found that there's really momentum in the Perl 6 community, and I'm even more happy to to observe that people hack on other people's projects.

For example Johan Viklund, co-author of the November wiki chimed in with the installed-modules branch of proto, making it usable rather quickly. Martin Berends jumped on the train that diakopter set off by starting his new pet project, a Perl 6 interpreter that emits javascript and runs it through the V8 engine (more on that project in one of the next blog posts).

Solomon Foster joined the Rakudo development and did some very significant work on the trigonometric functions and the corresponding tests. However it suffered from rather weird dispatch where some some methods that are defined in parrot's Complex PMC were not overridable. So today I started a branch which aims to implement the Complex class completely in Perl 6, and using the Complex PMC only by delegation through inline PIR. I just ripped out all the old stuff, and Solomon and I started to re-add them.

On a completely unrelated note I want to point out that we have some SQL support in Perl 6 now, through Tene's perl6-sqlite module.

The image above shows the development of the numbers of projects known to proto over time - another indication of the momentum we're gathering.