I agree that the packaging of Perl 6 needs to be improved, particularly for Windows. It's easy in Linux and Mac.
Languages are a specification and implementation. Perl's been implemented in Rakudo, which runs on MoarVM and the JVM. It's handy being able to run on multiple VMs so that you can take advantage of their strengths, and in particular, places that deploy the JVM for Java will be simpler to integrate with, and apparently you can do stuff across with Java libraries even, though I haven't played with that at all myself.
Right now you get your choice of MoarVM or JVM to use as the tie into your OS, and MoarVM gets selected by default. It's started showing up in Linux distributions now too.
Languages are a specification and implementation. Perl's been implemented in Rakudo, which runs on MoarVM and the JVM. It's handy being able to run on multiple VMs so that you can take advantage of their strengths, and in particular, places that deploy the JVM for Java will be simpler to integrate with, and apparently you can do stuff across with Java libraries even, though I haven't played with that at all myself.
http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo/#Installing-Rakudo-Star-... that's how I get it. Rakudo::Star is just a bundle of Rakudo with a bunch of commonly used modules which can be handy to have already installed.
Right now you get your choice of MoarVM or JVM to use as the tie into your OS, and MoarVM gets selected by default. It's started showing up in Linux distributions now too.