Welcome to the 6th annual edition of the Perl 6 advent calendar, code name 2014.

In 2014, MoarVM has become the de facto standard backend for the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler. Parrot and JVM are still supported as backends, but MoarVM provides much lower memory usage, faster startup time, and is significantly faster than parrot at runtime.

Rakudo on MoarVM also has concurrency support, including reactive programming.

Much work has been done to improve performance, some in MoarVM, some in Rakudo and NQP. Maybe most notably is the JIT compiler for MoarVM that came out of the Google Summer of Code project by Bart Wiegmans.

Another Google Summer of Code project by Filip Sergot brought us HTTP::UserAgent, a versatile HTTP client library with SSL/TLS support.

During the Austrian Perl Workshop in fall 2014, many of the Perl 6 and Rakudo core contributors met, and identified three roadblocks for a "final" Perl 6.0 release: GLR, NFG and NSA.

Here GLR stands for the Grand List Refactoring, a plan to make the list-y types more transparent, list iteration faster, and more obvious when a list will flatten.

NFG is the Normal Form Grapheme, a plan for implementing grapheme-based string indexing.

Finally, our NSA has nothing to do with surveillance. Natively Shaped Arrays are a flexible feature for declaring typed, potentially multi-dimensional arrays, potentially with pre-defined dimensions. It will make memory-efficient matrix storage and operations possible, for example.

With these three blockers defined, Larry Wall submitted a talk to FOSDEM called Get ready to party!, predicting that 2015 will be the year that Perl 6 will get a production release.

Sorry, this was meant to become a summary of the current state of Perl 6, and it derailed into an outlook. To allow me to keep the "state" in the title, let me just tell you that Rakudo on the MoarVM is quite fun to work with. It's fast enough for small (and sometimes even mid-sized) tasks, module installation works fairly reliably, and the range of available modules has also increased.

Also I feel that any attempt to summarize the progress of this awesome community is bound to be very incomplete; I hope that my fellow Perl 6 hackers will fill in some details in the upcoming 23 posts.

Have a nice pre-Christmas time, and enjoy the show!