A Rakudo * Update

2010-04-08

Note: I neglected to cross-post this journal post to rakudo.org when I wrote it a couple of weeks ago; apologies.

The last week has brought some sad news. While software is of course insignificant compared to life and health, and it's absolutely right that at this time Rakudo should be the last thing Pm should be worrying about, I know a lot of people will be wondering what this means for the Rakudo * release. Myself and the other Rakudo developers are still working out the exact details, but here's an overview.

• Rakudo * will be delayed in the "not in late April" sense. We all agree on this. There's no way you can take the lead developer of a project away, when the overall team isn't that big anyway, and expect to deliver the same product on the same schedule.
• While I've always stated Q2 in my talks, we've also always had an internal target date of April. Of course, this is open source so nothing is internal, and April has been widely latched on to. :-) We're sticking with the Q2 goal, but now expect to deliver in May or June (preferably, before YAPC::NA :-)).
• While we do of course greatly miss Pm's company, direction, and code, I'm comfortable that there's not anything on the Rakudo * ROADMAP that absolutely blocks on Pm. There's things that are harder for the rest of us to do, but we've actually tackled some of them head-on in the last several days, and now have first cuts of many of them - or in some cases are virtually done with them.

There's been a lot of exciting progress in Rakudo recently - the ChangeLog for the last release gives a bunch of it, but we've done a whole load more since then too. I'll try and blog about some of it soonish. In the meantime, I'd like to thank all of the Rakudo and Perl 6 team for being amazing to work with on this, and my thoughts and prayers are with Pm and Paula.