Having it both ways [LWN.net]

Having it both ways

Posted Feb 12, 2013 11:32 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Goodbye, duct tape by raiph
Parent article: Chromatic: Goodnight, Parrot

I am missing something. In my simplistic reading, there are two leading Perl6 compilers; one (niecza) targets the CLR and thus the .NET runtime, which is proprietary (although there is a Free software reimplementation called Mono, the spec is still proprietary and patented by Microsoft). The other (rakudo) targets Parrot which apparently is an evolutionary dead-end and has lots of performance and encoding problems; the way out of these problems is Rakudo on the JVM, which is again proprietary or depends on a lawsuit-happy company (Oracle in this case). I see no mention of a JavaScript backend on the front page of either compiler.

Given that there isn't a single official runtime, I see a maze with just dead ends and proprietary options. It is like the situation with Linux a few years ago when graphics drivers were either unusable or proprietary; the community worked on it and now we have very good free drivers for popular boards. Is the Perl6 community similarly worried, or happy with the situation?

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Having it both ways

Posted Feb 12, 2013 12:03 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

Oracle's JVM may be proprietary software (depending on what you download), but there are plenty of free virtual machines to run the language. It's not an open standard in the sense of being collaboratively developed by a standards body, but nor are lots of good and free things (X is an open standard; Wayland is not). More or less the same remarks apply to .NET.

Having it both ways

Posted Feb 12, 2013 13:50 UTC (Tue) by raiph (guest, #89283) [Link]

> I am missing something. In my simplistic reading, there are two leading Perl6 compilers; one (niecza) targets the CLR ... other (rakudo) targets Parrot ... [and soon] JVM ... I see no mention of a JavaScript backend

Indeed you are missing something. While you didn't see a mention of a JavaScript backend, it's plausible pmurias will have it done before jnthn completes the JVM port. And what about swarley's Go port?