PONIE HAS BEEN PUT OUT TO PASTURE

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Over the past several years, one key aspect of the migration plan to  
Perl 6 has been the Ponie project, a fusion of the Perl 5 runtime  
with Parrot. Sponsored by Fotango, Artur Bergman and Nicholas Clark  
did a heroic job cleaning up Perl's internals to make it possible to  
replace some components of Perl 5 with Parrot, one piece at a time,  
while still keeping the core of the Perl 5 runtime intact with 100%  
bug-for-bug compatibility. Along the way, Nicholas ported several  
significant Perl core improvements from Ponie back to the Perl 5.9 tree.

Ponie never really became a community project. All significant work  
was done as part of Fotango's sponsorship. When it had good momentum  
and sponsored developers, it needed a number of Parrot features that  
weren't yet available.  At this point, Ponie has not been in active  
development for almost half a year and it's my unhappy duty to  
declare the project dead.

Norman Nunley is currently working to do a final extraction of  
unharvested improvements from the Ponie code before we put it out to  
pasture.  Lots of good came out of Ponie, just not the good things we  
expected.

A number of very talented hackers are currently exploring multiple  
strategies to enable most Perl 5 code to run seamlessly along side  
Perl 6 in Parrot.  Folks have already demonstrated a proof-of-concept  
Parrot VM embedded in the Perl 5 runtime. Work is underway on a Perl  
5 to Perl 6 translator and the existing Perl 6 compiler on Parrot is  
the proof of concept for a similar implementation of a "regularized"  
Perl 5. At this point, it wouldn't be reasonable to bless any one  
right way forward but each of these techniques (and possibly others)  
could play a part in whatever "5 on 6" scheme we end up with.  No  
matter what happens, we're committed to making your Perl 5 code play  
well with new Perl 6 code.

		
Jesse Vincent
Perl 6 Project Manager

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