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The Swiss Perl Workshop was recently hosted in Olten, Switzerland, at the end of August, 2015. The Perl 6 team is targeting an official release by Christmas of 2015, and the workshop provided a great opportunity for core Perl 6 developers to complete a lot of Perl 6 development and training.

One of the last big changes before we're ready for Christmas is the Great List Refactor - an effort to improve performance, syntax and semantics of lists (especially lazy lists) in Perl 6.

At the workshop, we were working hard on the GLR - finalizing any outstanding design decisions, going through the ticketing system, the design docs, and the test suite. By the time the workshop was over, we were down to 100 failing tests (out of over 100,000), and the module installer (panda) was working with the newest version. Many new tests were added supporting the new behavior.

In the past few days, the GLR work has been merged back to the main development branch of Rakudo, and these improvements will be available in the next monthly compiler release.

I recorded a Q&A chat with Larry Wall covering Perl 6's community, history and future. We're hoping this recording will make it onto youtube.com shortly.

There were many (well attended!) Perl 6 talks, as well as hands-on Perl 6 classes provided by Jonathan Worthington, one of Rakudo's core developers.

More financial support was generated for both the Perl 5 and Perl 6 Core development funds - thanks to all who donated.

Much non-GLR related work was also done - bug fixing & ticket maintenance; improving the reliability of the smoke testing suite; Improvements to documentation and examples, cleaning up compiler warnings; work on getting PAUSE/CPAN ready for Perl 6 distributions.

Thanks again to the hosts and sponsors of the Swiss Perl Workshop!