First off apologies if there is some posting/site which details this well - I started at www.parrotcode.org and spent a while fruitlessly wondering why noone had posted at the mailing list archive nicely html'ified http://archive.develooper.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ for a while
before finding the far more useful active state site (which would be nice to link from parrotcode.org for occassional watchers like myself). Anyway, even with search I couldn't find an answer... so... i'm hoping someone can enlighten me. I run a large a Perl5 based project and although we are rather dangerously addicted to Perl5, the reference counting GC, lack of good threads and inability to have (optional) compile-time checking is a real pain in the arse for the amount of code we have. We also have a parallel Java API for our system, and although Java does behave v. annoyingly in some cornor cases in some implementations the strong compile-time checking and then the cute integration with Jython for lightweigt scripting is pretty close to heaven... [Yup; we have played with Inline::Java - got burnt one year ago, we are taking it for a spin in another project now, but this does seem essentially clunky] Now - an ideal world would be: Perl-5 or Perl-5 like syntax for lightweight scripting Java or Java-like syntax for objects An consistent, few-cornor case, executation engine that can handle circular references and threads Embeddable in Apache like mod_perl perl6 as a language looks cute, but... is not so necessary. So... my question is - Can anyone give me dates for the above features in the parrot/perl[5|6] path? Is it "sometime in 2004" for an alpha release or "sometime in 2005" for an alpha release or "we're really not sure, check back in 6 months?" And, out of interest, what is the rate limiting step for this (amount of coffee given to Dan?) I realise this is a somewhat frustrating question to answer, but any answers (even partial) would help thanks ewan
