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- Current State of Exceptions in Rakudo and Perl 6
- Meet DBIish, a Perl 6 Database Interface
- doc.perl6.org and p6doc
- Exceptions Grant Report for May 2012
- Exceptions Grant Report -- Final update
- Perl 6 Hackathon in Oslo: Be Prepared!
- Localization for Exception Messages
- News in the Rakudo 2012.05 release
- News in the Rakudo 2012.06 release
- Perl 6 Hackathon in Oslo: Report From The First Day
- Perl 6 Hackathon in Oslo: Report From The Second Day
- Quo Vadis Perl?
- Rakudo Hack: Dynamic Export Lists
- SQLite support for DBIish
- Stop The Rewrites!
- Upcoming Perl 6 Hackathon in Oslo, Norway
- A small regex optimization for NQP and Rakudo
- Pattern Matching and Unpacking
- Rakudo's Abstract Syntax Tree
- The REPL trick
- First day at YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev
- YAPC Europe 2013 Day 2
- YAPC Europe 2013 Day 3
- A new Perl 6 community server - call for funding
- New Perl 6 community server now live, accepting signups
- A new Perl 6 community server - update
- All Perl 6 modules in a box
- doc.perl6.org: some stats, future directions
- Profiling Perl 6 code on IRC
- Why is it hard to write a compiler for Perl 6?
- Writing docs helps you take the user's perspective
- Perl 6 Advent Calendar 2016 -- Call for Authors
- Perl 6 By Example: Running Rakudo
- Perl 6 By Example: Formatting a Sudoku Puzzle
- Perl 6 By Example: Testing the Say Function
- Perl 6 By Example: Testing the Timestamp Converter
- Perl 6 By Example: Datetime Conversion for the Command Line
- What is Perl 6?
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- Perl 6 By Example: Testing Silent Cron
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- Perl 6 By Example: Improved INI Parsing with Grammars
- Perl 6 By Example: Generating Good Parse Errors from a Parser
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- Perl 6 By Example: Functional Refactorings for Directory Visualization Code
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- What's a Variable, Exactly?
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- Perl 6 By Example: Stacked Plots with Matplotlib
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- Perl 6 Books Landscape in June 2017
- Living on the (b)leading edge
- The Loss of Name and Orientation
- Perl 6 Fundamentals Now Available for Purchase
- My Ten Years of Perl 6
- Perl 6 Coding Contest 2019: Seeking Task Makers
- A shiny perl6.org site
- Creating an entry point for newcomers
- An offer for software developers: free IRC logging
- Sprixel, a 6 compiler powered by JavaScript
- Announcing try.rakudo.org, an interactive Perl 6 shell in your browser
- Another perl6.org iteration
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- Why I commit Crud to the Perl 6 Test Suite
- This Week's Contribution to Perl 6 Week 5: Implement Str.trans
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- This Week's Contribution to Perl 6 Week 9: Implement Hash.pick for Rakudo
- This Week's Contribution to Perl 6 Week 11: Improve an error message for Hyper Operators
- This Week's Contribution to Perl 6 - Lottery Intermission
- This Week's Contribution to Perl 6 Week 3: Write supporting code for the MAIN sub
- This Week's Contribution to Perl 6 Week 1: A website for proto
- This Week's Contribution to Perl 6 Week 4: Implement :samecase for .subst
- This Week's Contribution to Perl 6 Week 10: Implement samespace for Rakudo
- This Week's Contribution to Perl 6 Week 7: Implement try.rakudo.org
- What is the "Cool" class in Perl 6?
- Report from the Perl 6 Hackathon in Copenhagen
- Custom operators in Rakudo
- A Perl 6 Date Module
- Defined Behaviour with Undefined Values
- Dissecting the "Starry obfu"
- The case for distributed version control systems
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- Perl 6 Compiler Feature Matrix
- The first Perl 6 module on CPAN
- A Foray into Perl 5 land
- Gabor: Keep going
- First Grant Report: Structured Error Messages
- Second Grant Report: Structured Error Messages
- Third Grant Report: Structured Error Messages
- Fourth Grant Report: Structured Error Messages
- Google Summer of Code Mentor Recap
- How core is core?
- How fast is Rakudo's "nom" branch?
- Building a Huffman Tree With Rakudo
- Immutable Sigils and Context
- Is Perl 6 really Perl?
- Mini-Challenge: Write Your Prisoner's Dilemma Strategy
- List.classify
- Longest Palindrome by Regex
- Perl 6: Lost in Wonderland
- Lots of momentum in the Perl 6 community
- Monetize Perl 6?
- Musings on Rakudo's spectest chart
- My first executable from Perl 6
- My first YAPC - YAPC::EU 2010 in Pisa
- Trying to implement new operators - failed
- Programming Languages Are Not Zero Sum
- Perl 6 notes from February 2011
- Notes from the YAPC::EU 2010 Rakudo hackathon
- Let's build an object
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- How to get a parse tree for a Perl 6 Program
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- The Real World Strikes Back - or why you shouldn't forbid stuff just because you think it's wrong
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- Set Phasers to Stun!
- Starry Perl 6 obfu
- Recent Perl 6 Developments August 2008
- The State of Regex Modifiers in Rakudo
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- A SVG plotting adventure
- A Syntax Highlighter for Perl 6
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- Want to write shiny SVG graphics with Perl 6? Port Scruffy!
- We write a Perl 6 book for you
- When we reach 100% we did something wrong
- Where Rakudo Lives Now
- Why Rakudo needs NQP
- Why was the Perl 6 Advent Calendar such a Success?
- What you can write in Perl 6 today
- Why you don't need the Y combinator in Perl 6
- You are good enough!
Fri, 17 Jul 2009
Rakudo architectural overview
Permanent link
The other day Su-Shee asked on IRC if I could tell her which components of Rakudo are written in which programming language. So here it is:
The source code is entered at the top of the machine named Rakudo, and is transformed in various stages. The first two, parser and action methods, are actually part of Rakudo, and are hosted in the Rakudo repository. They are written in two different subsets of Perl 6, the regexes (parser), and "Not Quite Perl 6", short NQP (action methods).
The next two stages (PAST and POST compiler) are part of the so-called "Parrot Compiler Toolkit", short PCT. Both PAST and POST are structural representations of the program, with PAST being more high-level than POST. Both compilers are written in PIR, the parrot assembly language, and are distributed along with parrot. They are also used by many other parrot based languages.
The POST compiler emits PIR, which IMCC transforms into byte code. IMCC is parrot's PIR compiler, written in C and statically linked into parrot. The byte code (PBC) can then be stored to disk, or executed in memory by a so-called run core or run loop, which is in some sense the heart of parrot - or one of the hearts, because there are several different ones available (one for just-in-time compilation (JIT), one for debugging etc.).
There are also some supporting custom types and operations in Rakudo called dynamic PMCs and dynamic ops which are written in C, and helper functions written in other languages (namely NQP and PIR). Those do not show up in the flow chart.
The part of Rakudo described so far is the stage one compiler.
In the build process it is compiled first, and then it compiles the setting
library down to PBC. "Setting library" is a fancy term describing the
built-in functions which are written in Perl 6. The result of this compilation
(together with a low level runtime library in PIR) is linked together with the
stage one compiler and parrot, the result is the perl6
executable.
Glossary
- PGE
- Parrot Grammar Engine, parrot's grammar engine for Perl 6 regexes and grammars.
- NQP
- Not Quite Perl 6, a small subset of Perl 6 that is used for tree transformations in compilers.
- PAST
- Parrot Abstract Syntax Tree, an in-memory representation of structures common to many programming languages (like variable declarations, branches, loops, subroutine calls).
- POST
- Parrot Opcode Syntax Tree, an in-memory low level representation of programs.
- PCT
- Parrot Compiler Toolkit, a collection of tools and compilers useful for writing other compilers.
- PIR
- Parrot Intermediate Representation, the most commonly used for of parrot assembly (which is still high-level enough to be written by humans).
- IMCC
- InterMediate Code Compiler, the part of parrot that compiles PIR into byte code.
- PBC
- Parrot Byte Code, the binary form to which all parrot programs are compiled in the end.