It took a while to design the language, which went through significant changes in both semantics and implementation (Parrot was abandoned for MoarVM, until rece

It took a while to design the language, which went through significant changes in both semantics and implementation (Parrot was abandoned for MoarVM, until recently, the main banch of the repository still was called 'nom' for 'new object model', there was a Great List Refactor, ...) The language was finally deemed sufficiently stable in 2015 to have its first proper release (the 'Christmas' version 6.c). We're still waiting for an implementation with adequate performance for generic usage. The problem is that a lot of the implementation happens at a high level, which necessitates a sufficiently smart optimizer.