After a week of delay, precompiled Prelude.pm is finally upon us. Time for make smoke instantly dropped from 2209 seconds to less than 1000 seconds; this also enables a shared set of primitives among different backends, written in Perl 6, without the overhead of reparsing and recompilation. Much kudos for gaal who did most of the heavy lifting; all I did was implementing closure support in pugscc.
With this, 6.2.8 is finally in sight; Stevan is changelogging as I write this. There are some minor breakage, and I need to verify PIR compilation versus Parrot 0.2.2, but things look good now. See you tomorrow!
