The history is more complex than that. There had been at least two serious attempts at Perl 6 implementations based on Parrot when Pugs arrived, but Audrey appr

The history is more complex than that. There had been at least two serious attempts at Perl 6 implementations based on Parrot when Pugs arrived, but Audrey approached implementation from a completely different direction. Instead of building bottom up, she started with the parser and tried to implement things as driven by the desire to turn the specifications into tests that parsed and then passed. Pugs ended up succeeding in the sense that it produced that test suite, but it didn't succeed in that it relied on Audrey's presence--it never attracted a sufficient developer base to maintain it when she wasn't available. Rakudo isn't anywhere near complete now, almost seven years later, and I believe Pugs passes no more than 30% of Rakudo's test suite. It might be fair to say that the goalposts have moved in the intervening time, however.