Ponie never really became a community project. All significant work
was done as part of Fotango's sponsorship. When it had good momentum
and sponsored developers, it needed a number of Parrot features that
weren't yet available. At this point, Ponie has not been in active
development for almost half a year and it's my unhappy duty to
declare the project dead.
Norman Nunley is currently working to do a final extraction of
unharvested improvements from the Ponie code before we put it out to
pasture. Lots of good came out of Ponie, just not the good things we
expected.
A number of very talented hackers are currently exploring multiple
strategies to enable most Perl 5 code to run seamlessly along side
Perl 6 in Parrot. Folks have already demonstrated a proof-of-concept
Parrot VM embedded in the Perl 5 runtime. Work is underway on a Perl
5 to Perl 6 translator and the existing Perl 6 compiler on Parrot is
the proof of concept for a similar implementation of a "regularized"
Perl 5. At this point, it wouldn't be reasonable to bless any one
right way forward but each of these techniques (and possibly others)
could play a part in whatever "5 on 6" scheme we end up with. No
matter what happens, we're committed to making your Perl 5 code play
well with new Perl 6 code.
- Jesse
Perl 6 Project Manager