Early Perl6

Try first Perl6 stable release.

This article was written 9 months before official Perl6 release on XMas 2015. It contains instructions about how to build it from sources but you may want to use a tool like rakudobrew to manage Perl6 installations.

I read the announce of Rakudo Star as a

a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6

so let’s try it.

Install

Create a folder for your brand new Perl6.

export PERL6_BASE=$HOME/perl6
mkdir $PERL6_BASE

Do not use any ~ in the PERL6_BASE value, cause is not expanded by MoarVM Configule.pl script.

You need Perl and few CPAN modules.

cpan autodie

Get and build MoarVM

cd /tmp
wget http://moarvm.com/releases/MoarVM-2015.03.tar.gz
tar xf MoarVM-2015.03.tar.gz
cd MoarVM-2015.03
perl Configure.pl --prefix=$HOME/perl6
make install

So far so good, let’s install Rakudo

cd /tmp
wget http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/rakudo-star-2015.03.tar.gz
tar xf rakudo-star-2015.03.tar.gz
cd rakudo-star-2015.03
perl Configure.pl --backend=moar --prefix=$PERL6_BASE --gen-moar
make
make rakudo-test
make install

Hello Perl6

Ok, let’s say Hello World with Perl6.

Add perl6 to your PATH

export PATH=$PERL6_BASE/bin:$PATH

Create a file Hello.pl6 containing

say "Hello World"

and run it

perl6 Hello.pl6

Yes I know, it looks like Perl5, but now we can play with Perl6. Happy coding!