Pony

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Ponie is the code name for an open source project that Perl 5 on Parrot , which for Perl 6 developed virtual machine , port wanted. Put simply, it translates Perl 5 code so that it can call Perl 6 functions and vice versa. This should make the entire CPAN Perl 6 programs available.

The name Ponie is a backronym for Perl On New Internal Engine , but was chosen as an allusion to the phrase "I want a pony", which was often used in london.pm , Perl's largest local user group, to describe hard-to-fulfill requests to express.

background

Since there are so many programs and modules written in Perl 5, there are very strong personal and commercial interests in keeping Perl 5 source code running for as long as possible. In addition, when Perl 6 was being planned, it was announced that the transition would be as gentle as possible. With Ponie you can seamlessly switch to the new interpreter with a Perl 5 program and translate module by module as you wish, while the overall application remains executable. Last but not least, with Ponie the large library of CPAN modules, which contribute a large part to Perl's practical use, can also be used for Perl 6 programs.

Development and planning

These problems are to be overcome with the Ponie project, started on July 8, 2003 by the Perl Foundation and supported by the London software company Fotango, which was announced by Larry Wall at OSCON 2003 . Fotango employee Arthur Bergmann originally took over the management, in 2005 his colleague Nicholas Clark took over . An alpha version of the project is available for download on the homepage. It is planned to always keep up with the latest Perl 5, so that Ponie should be fully compatible with Perl 5.10 later. This is to make the change from Perl 5 to Perl 6 as easy as possible, since everyone is free to choose when to change the language or the interpreter technology. Software written in Perl 5 can be ported piece by piece to Perl6 using Ponie, which is particularly important for large projects and commercial software providers. By porting them to Parrot, old Perl modules can in principle not only be used by Perl 6, but by all languages ​​that can run on Parrot.

Cessation of development

Since the project did not receive enough support from the Perl online community and the development was mainly driven by Fotango, its discontinuation was officially announced in August 2006 on the Perl Foundation website. It was checked to what extent existing code, which is often used elsewhere, can be meaningfully reused and exploited.

successor

Since Ponie’s goal is critical to the success of Perl 6, there have been several attempts to achieve it in other ways. The currently most promising perspective is offered by the MoarVM optimized for Rakudo .

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