Rakudo - feedback from Wellington.pm testfest

[Sam Vilain]

Perhaps the weather was too nice for a large turn-out, but we still had
enough people to make it interesting and worthwhile.  Being a small
group, we focused more on general user experience things than working
through a list of missing features or coming up with tests etc.

In no particular order, here are the things that one or more of us
thought would really help rakudo perl 6:

 * installation; this needs to work, and there needs to be standard
   library paths that extensions can install to.

 * error messages; missing is the source code line of the error.  That's
   the most important thing wrong with it, but it also seems to contain
   a lot of information which isn't much use.  And I also couldn't tell
   which phase of the program that the error was occurring in - ie,
   compiling vs runtime.

 * The interactive mode needs to be much friendlier.  How about a
   banner?  Ideally, like python's repl ('help') and ghci (':h and :t'),
   there should be access to API documentation linked with classes, and
   potentially for inspecting the types of things etc.

 * I also consider a working debugger vitally important.

 * It seems far too easy to write a program which consumes all available
   VM.  Perhaps it's worth building some safety limits in?  Something
   like a soft default ulimit that programs have to explicitly raise if
   they want to grow beyond the default maximum size.

Big ups to the Rakudo Perl/Parrot team for getting it this far already!

Sam.