Not at all - and Larry has been working on perl6 for years, so the people behind vanilla perl5 are a different group again.

The perl11 people are mostly disgruntled kooks who got kicked out of perl5/perl6 development after yelling at everybody for not instantly believing everything they said.

Meanwhile, actual perl5 and rakudo continue to progress.

This claim by mst is patently false. While it may be true that some people in the Perl community disagree with Reini Urban (AKA rurban, creator of cperl and co-founder of Perl 11), by no means does Reini alone constitute "most" of the Perl 11 team. In fact, Reini is only 1/3 of the co-founding Perl 11 team, which includes Ingy döt Net and myself. At this time, we have a significantly larger number of people involved in various Perl 11 projects, including my own RPerl compiler. SO LET'S BE CLEAR! mst does NOT speak for the Perl community in any official way, and his opinion is (in this case) grossly inaccurate.

Aren't the perl11 projects an umbrella name for a bunch of different projects? A large part of them aren't done by disgruntled kooks. Only rurban seems to have some bad blood with parts of the Perl 6 community after his claims about threads that don't interact with each others where mocked as magical by people who didn't notice what he was trying to sell.

It was niner's project. His threads project was being wrongly attacked, and nobody cared. It was a very strange and calculated attack, when they launched their competing VM. I completely agreed with most of the criticism. But I still think lockless threading would be great to have, as waiting for locks by far outnumbers all CPU disadvantages with the broken parrot calling convention and general problems there. People are still fond of Erlang also, and parrot threading model and implementation is much better than Erlang threads or Go threads and everything else but Pony's.

It's no bad blood though. Hype-driven development has it's place, see rust and javascript. Throwing away unique technical advantages for pure marketing reasons to unite the community against someone else didn't go fine with me. It was no vilification as in p5p though. It was just silly.

I don't think so. It seems to be those that are not the current perl5 maintainers (perl 5 porters), or the perl6 devs. But I could be wrong.

Yes, I think it's mainly one dev trying to make it best fit their own use case.

The two most usable examples (aside from MoarVM, which isn't really connected in any clear way, as it is the current mainline VM implementation for Perl 6), cperl and RPerl, are by two different developers, with different but occasionally overlapping goals. The author of cperl posts on HN frequently, so it seems likely he'd have interesting thoughts on this.

The concept of calling a bunch of marginally related and only partly compatible projects "Perl 11" is kinda weird marketing, IMHO. It's been around for a while, and I think it's the author of RPerl's thing.

But, I think it's definitely a situation where the projects are developers scratching their own itch, and diverging in not insignificant ways from mainline Perl 5 (and Perl 6 is not really in the picture for either cperl or RPerl). I don't know that it's a bad thing; Ruby and Python both have forks or implementations that are weird and non-mainline and no one considers them detracting from the Ruby or Python community, in general. Though, none of those projects called themselves Python 5, or whatever.

perl 11 came from 5+6=11, which was Ingy's idea. Will (rperl) and I (cperl, parrot) liked it, so we sticked to it. We are three.

The idea was to come up with something like pypy performance-wise (i.e. parrot done right without all the destruction done later) and perl6 feature-wise.

perl6 is THE picture for cperl, because it has a proper spec for the useful features, to void the usual bike shedding, plaguing p5p since day 10.

The picture for RPerl is not perl6 but performance, proper mapping of perl5 code to C++ data and algos, eliminating run-time magic.

The other projects are doing their thing also, which is fine and encouraging.

Thanks for the clarification. I know Will, as we currently live in the same city, but I haven't followed development of any of the projects mentioned very closely.

Well, each of the projects on that page have separate, but slightly overlapping contributors based on github. I was amazed that: A) Many of the projects on that page are alive and have commits within the last few days. B) They actually seem to be doing what they set out to do. Especially cperl. C) The existence of Rperl, which looks likey pypy for perl.

It is not.