rakudo perl6 runs on win32

The French Perl Workshop 2010 had a whole track on perl6; so before going there, I quickly downloaded the parrot and rakudo packages for win32 from sourceforge, with the intent of playing with perl6 during the (long!) trip from Geneva to Calais. I've been reading and hearing about perl6 for some years, but so far I had never taken time to give it a try.

Alas, the distribution did not work, complaining for a missing DLL that I didn't know where to find. So I had plenty of time for other, more urgent tasks during the travel, but sadly I hadn't written a single line of perl6 yet.

At the conference, I started telling my neighbour about this misadventure ... and it turned out that this neighbour was François Perrad, the author of the parrotwin32 package ! François quickly found out the problem with the distribution; we fixed it manually on my machine, and François is going to issue a new distribution within a few days.

So, because of this nice coincidence, I finally was able to write my first "hello, world" program in perl6.

The next step will be to try to do some real work ... but for this I need a database connection, and as far as I know, the DBI redesign for perl6 by Tim Bunce is not complete yet. I talked about this to Martin Berends, who had given several talks on perl6 during the day .... and nice coincidence again, it turns out that Martin has a "fakedbi" project that implements a subset of Perl DBI , ported from perl5 to perl6 !

So after these lucky coincidences, my only problem is that I no longer have any excuse for not looking seriously at perl6 !