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Parrots, Pythons And Things That Go Splat
ajs writes "As you may know, there was a contest between Dan Sugalski and Guido van Rossum over the performance of Parrot running Python byte-code, and the loser was to take a pie in the face. Well, in the end it was between Dan and time and Dan lost... he was unable to get the Python bytecode translator to work sufficiently well for the contest (it was fast, but not complete), but when Dan conceded, Guido was gracious enough to decline to throw a pie, what a sport! The Perl community, however, was not quite so gracious (they wanted to see Dan take a pie for the team), and the final event ended up being a benefit for the Perl Foundation. Meanwhile, see Dan's Blog for details on what sorts of Parrot goodness came of this."
it is also worth noting that scripting languages tend to have a faster startup time than java-esque languages. In general, anyway.
:) and I've heard this difference might prove faster.
On my 450mhz PII, running a simple java application takes a few seconds to start, while the equiv. perl
or python program starts up without any noticable delay.
And perl has to compile the program before it runs it...
Parrot vs. JVM is going to be very interesting,
too. JVM is a stack-based VM, while I believe Parrot is register-based (like most real machines, actually.
Plus writting in parrot asm is fun!
Parrot is indeed register based. At least when compared to Perl 5, this is a tremendous advantage. Perl 5's VM spends a lot of time fiddling with its stack (pushing a marker on, pushing arguments on, pulling arguments off and checking for a marker) that Parrot can avoid altogether. Of course, that means that Parrot needs to spend time saving and restoring register stacks, but Dan's position is that there's enough good research on the subject to make optimizations practical.
Tell me about it. I'm a day or two from checking in simple-but-useful OpenGL bindings.
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