I've been learning the Rakudo innards like crazy this past week. I keep staying up past midnight every day -- "just one more bug..."
I suffered some despair over the weekend when I realized that two fundamental features didn't work 1) lexpad variables under recursion and 2) "::" as a namespace separator. For the latter, I had worked around it by using "PDF__Grammar" instead of "PDF::Grammar" (that is, a one-level namespace instead of N-level). But now it's fixed thanks to a big patch from Jonathan Worthington and a little one from me. Yay!
The lexpad bug is a bigger one and it's killing my progress because re-entering a method overwrites the lexical variables of the previous call. I know Patrick Michaud is actively working on it though, so I've satisfied myself by working on the other bugs in the meantime.
It's a little hard to dig through the code because there's so many layers (Perl6->PGE->NQP->PAST->POST->PIR), but I'm generally quite impressed with the Rakudo and Parrot/PCT implementation. PIR is surprisingly readable, despite being an assembler-like language. NQP is deceptively close to Perl, which keeps throwing me off. And PGE just rocks.
