Martin Berends

The Asus Transformer Prime (TF201) is an outstanding Android tablet and with keyboard it is a very good netbook replacement. Using Linux Installer aided by some tweaks you can make it build and run current (June 2012) Parrot and Rakudo. On a Debian Stable (6.0 Squeeze) installation, you need only use apt-get to install the git-core, gcc and make packages (optionally libicu-dev) and do a standard Rakudo build.

Some numbers: Total file system usage for Debian, Parrot, Rakudo and spectests is 883MB. The --gen-parrot step takes 25 minutes. Building perl6 takes 33 minutes, or 27 with 'make --jobs=4'. Resident memory exceeds 786MB when compiling the Setting (Android has no swap). An idle perl6 REPL uses under 24MB of memory. It takes a little over 2 hours to run 'make spectest' normally or 66 minutes if you do 'export TEST_JOBS=4' first. A perl6 process running a typical spectest has around 70MB resident in memory.

Hopefully this information will encourage some people to try hacking Perl 6 on Android.