I don't know; I suppose "mature" wrt software is not unlike "mature" wrt human beings -- it means "when you stop growing fast and changing unpredictably", and m

I don't know; I suppose "mature" wrt software is not unlike "mature" wrt human beings -- it means "when you stop growing fast and changing unpredictably", and maybe "when other people rely on you". Or something like that. I don't think GIL-lessness [or any other feature] is related to "mature" (that would rather go into "incomplete" folder). You point out that you perl6 folks make a steady progress, and that the work you're doing is fairly hard. All valid points, but... I don't want to sound cruel, but a steady progress solving hard problems is not very valuable per se to the [potential] users of the software or employers of the participants. They usually care much more about results. If you deliver the results without much progress and avoiding hard problems, you're fine; if you do a lot of progress working through hard problems without practically useful results, you're screwed. You say your software works; fine, but for what definition of "work"? "Passes tests" is one thing, but "usable for production heavy lifting" is something in a completely different league. I see people migrating from ruby-1.8 to ruby-1.9 now and then; a move from python2 to python3 is a fairly rare beast; but did anyone move from perl5 to perl6? or started a non-toy / non-research project using perl6 / parrot? You mention the research value (new parsing techniques et ol). I have my share of doubts wrt this part (so does the author of the article, IIRC), but let's skip it. My bigger point is, is it what users and employers want? I honestly don't see it. Please don't misunderstand me here; I'm not saying you must do what some other people want. You, of course, are free to do whatever, I (or anybody else) is not in position to tell you what to do. But then again, when other people (production perl users, potential investors, employers and contributors -- in short, industry people, not research people) judge your projects, their judgments will probably be aligned with their very specific industrial needs, not with potential research value and/or some decades-long perspective.