Hi Alex,
your questions aren't "unbelievably dumb", to start off. Getting an
outsider's view is very hard if you're on the inside.
Yes, Rakudo * is a distribution of a compiler and some modules we hope
you'll find useful. In that way it's similar to the ActiveState or
Strawberry distributions of perl5. Just "Rakudo" would be installing
just the compiler, or building it from source or something like that.
In addition, everyone can come up with their own distribution of Rakudo.
The only requirement is to give it a distinct name (as per the Artistic
2 License).
I just wrote that "next section" you're referring to, so I'm glad to get
some feedback so quickly! If you look closely at your own message, you
may realize, that you not only know virtual box, VMWare and Hyper-V, but
also JVM.
The MoarVM and Parrot are VMs in the same way the JVM is a VM. They are
built as a platform to run a specific language on (or in Parrot's case:
any dynamic language). The other solutions, like VMWare or Virtual Box
are built to allow a full operating system to run inside them, rather
than just a single program (though that's not entirely true, as some
languages have compilation targets that create a "minimal operating
system for your program").
Finally, we do support the JVM with Rakudo itself, but there's been a
few bits of trouble with the modules we would like to ship with Rakudo
*, so we haven't released a Rakudo * for JVM yet.
I'd be glad if you could give me a bit of help with the formulation of
that section about the different versions.
And yes, you can use the JVM Rakudo version to call to Java Code and
back. I don't have a good example for you right now, though :(
Hope to Help!
- Timo
