Rakudo * is next door

Yes.
Rakudo *, the first official distribution of stable (yet incomplete) perl6 interpreter rakudo. Devs haven't focused on optimizations but features, and it's quite useful as it is IMHO. It brings lots of the crazy Perl 6 features announced in the synopsis like hyperoperators, metaoperators, lazyness, junctions, introspectable OOP, and regex and grammars as first class citizens in the language. That last thing means you can plug a new parser for your program in lexical scope. Welcome DSL world. Early adopters, language geeks, perl hackers, you have no excuse now not to try rakudo :) .

Myself I haven't toyed enough with Perl 6 to do anything useful, but I have done quite a few conceptual tests, and, although I'm still baby-talking Perl 6, it's quite nice to hang around at #perl6 and see perl6 heroes stressing rakudo's features till the unthought limits.

More good news: Audrey Tang appeared a few days ago on #perl6 (I think thanks to masak's post), and started hacking on niecza (sorear's perl6 implementation focused on compiler and interpreter optimization techniques).

I tried to solve one of moritz's perl6 Challenge, implementing Str.trans (á la p5 tr// ) in perl6. Mine, is the (really incomplete babyperly) submitted on a gist pastie. I didn't win the rakudo T-shirt.

More on Perl6. A couple of perl6 related posts reached HN and reddit top page and stayed more than 1 day there. buzz buzz buzz buzz :)

And last but not least, Barcelona Perl Mongers are living a celebration, on July 29th of July, the R* Day (and being the last thursday of the month, which is the usual meeting day) will join at UPC Campus Nord, and Alex Muntada will give a Perl6 introductory talk. Of course, you're all invited. Unfortunately, I won't be able to be there as I'll be in Malta. O HAI Holidays!