Yes, Perl6 was announced in 2000, but the actual implementation effort (both Parrot and Pugs) started in 2005. Parrot started in 2001, and there was at least o

Yes, Perl6 was announced in 2000, but the actual implementation effort (both Parrot and Pugs) started in 2005. Parrot started in 2001, and there was at least one P6 implementation in the works shortly after: https://github.com/parrot/parrot/commit/9bb281bf85088000ee40079dfc3599375571591a https://github.com/parrot/parrot/commit/9bb281bf85088000ee40... The Parrot backend was used to nail down the object system. That's not how I remember things. Jonathan may have implemented the current object system on Parrot, but then he prototyped one on the CLR and one on the JVM (or vice versa), then wrote one for Rakudo based on that. Concurrently, they are developing their own VM to get rid of the semantic mismatch between the language runtime and backend VM. That's a very charitable interpretation of what they're doing.