Refactoring a portion of Parrot's core is not a "rewrite".

I'm quite certain that Rakudo will keep functioning just fine.

Sometimes during the evolution of the greatest open source projects they look like crap to an outsider:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html

The greatest software takes time to build. Assuming Perl6 keeps plodding along it will take another 10 years before it is truly great.

I was pleasantly surprised by Allison Randall's talk at the emerging languages camp. While clearly Parrot has suffered some troubled times, I wouldn't write them off yet. There are some very smart and savvy people working on it.

Death knell, death schnell. The editorializing in the headline is inappropriate and inaccurate. The open-source community with the strongest testing culture of any programming language is refactoring some well-tested code.

Flagging this to request a headline rewrite.

Parrot has been nailed to the perch since Dan Sugalski left. (hi, chromatic, I'm the perfectly spherical sceptic you've been imagining)

rakudo-ng smells to me like the rakudo guys are preparing to be cross-VM.

I love my perl5 VM and therefore am not the expert on this. But I respect the other language in the perl family (Camelia spec, Rakudo implementation) and think your headline is overblown.