Slashdot Mirror
Parrot 0.1.1 'Poicephalus' Released
Pan T. Hose writes "The long awaited release of Parrot 0.1.1 "Poicephalus" has been finally announced on perl.perl6.internals newsgroup and perl6-internals mailing list simultaneously by Leopold Toetsch followed by an announcement on use Perl by Will Coleda and now also on Slashdot." (Read on for a list of changes since the last release, as well as a number of useful links.)
Pan T. Hose continues "The most important changes since the previous version 0.1.0 (code-named 'Leaping Kakapo' and
released in February) are:
- Python support: Parrot runs 4/7 of the pie-thon test suite
- Better OS support: more platforms, compilers, OS functions
- Improved PIR syntax for method calls and <op>= assignment
- Dynamic loading reworked including a "make install" target
- MMD - multi method dispatch for binary vtable methods
- Library improvement and cleanup
- BigInt, Complex, *Array, Slice, Enumerate, None PMC classes
- IA64 and hppa JIT support
- Tons of fixes, improvements, new tests, and documentation updates
from the faq:
Parrot is the new interpreter being designed from scratch to support the upcoming Perl6 language. It is being designed as a standalone virtual machine that can be used to execute bytecode compiled dynamic languages such as Perl6, but also Perl5. Ideally, Parrot can be used to support other dynamic, bytecode-compiled languages such as Python, Ruby and Tcl.
There are 10 kinds of people: Those that understand ternary; those that don't; and those that don't care.
Performance.
.NET VM didn't even exist when we started development, or at least we didn't know about it when we were working on the design. We do now, though it's still not suitable.
.NET back ends.
From the FAQ:
Why your own virtual machine? Why not compile to JVM/.NET?
Those VMs are designed for statically typed languages. That's fine, since Java, C#, and lots of other languages are statically typed. Perl isn't. For a variety of reasons, it means that Perl would run more slowly there than on an interpreter geared towards dynamic languages.
The
So you won't run on JVM/.NET?
Sure we will. They're just not our first target. We build our own interpreter/VM, then when that's working we start in on the JVM and/or
My UID is the product of 2 primes.
The problem is that Python's slowness isn't just from the interpreter, but the nature of the language. Notice how two similar objects don't require an interface to be used in the same way with the same methods? Because of that it will be hard to store members as anything but dictionaries, which are necessarily slow.
Either way Parrot will be an improvement, allowing shared Python/Perl/Ruby libraries, importing pure-python modules nicely, and most importantly: maybe we can finally sandbox Python. Rexec has been dead a long time, and Python is currently unusable as an embedding language without a lot of hacking because of that.
That's not what it is. Perl and Python (and most "major" interpreted languages, I would suspect), first compile the script to byte-code, then execute the byte-code in a VM.
.Net VM. .Net for two reasons: .Net didn't exist when they began :) .Net is designed for compiled languages (C++, C#, VB, etc), and supposedly that would cause a performance hit over a VM designed for interpreted languages. (Plus, it's not designed to be portable, like Parrot is)
At some point along the line, someone said "Hey! Why are we writting VMs for every single language? They all do pretty much the same thing!".
So Parrot is that, a common VM. Perl6 compiles to Parrot bytecode, instead of the perl-only-bytecode it was using for Perl5.
Since that bytecode format is open, and the VM free, any other interpreted (or compiled, I guess) language (Python, Ruby, TCL, LUA, whatever) can make their compilers output Parrot bytecode.
That way they don't have to build and maintain their own VM, and they get the benefits of future optimizations to Parrot.
For example, I could write a just-in-time compiler for Parrot for my favorite platform, and every Parrot-enabled language could take advantage of that.
Doing that now, I'd have to pick a language to optimize. Do I want to make Python faster? Or Perl?
Python is going to use it in the future,last I heard. (probably as another backend like Jython or IronPython, not as a replacement for CPython)
I think they were waiting on the byte-code format stabilizing.
All in all, it's a very cool idea. Makes it a hell of a lot easier for people to make new interpreted languages, since they only have to target Parrot, and they've got a mature, debugged, VM that runs on multiple platforms. (in theory, at least. I don't think it's there yet)
It's not that similar to the JavaVM (which is only designed to run Java, not a pile of different languages), but it is kinda like the
The developers of Parrot created Parrot instead of targeting
1.
2.
I respond to your sigs
Parrot is a very interesting project indeed, and it looks as if it is now starting to seriously pick up steam. What we're looking at here is VM that works, and is optimised for Perl, Python, Ruby, Forth and all those other lovely scripting languages.
.NET and Java vs. C# people seemed to have missed Parrot creeping up from behind. Potentially Parrot can pull together Perl, Python and Ruby - imagine CPAN that works with all of those languages at once, but pulls in all the interesting Python and Ruby libraries too.
.NET via Mono or Java via JVM shoudl start considering Perl/Python/Ruby via Parrot as a very serious choice for doing the high level application programming.
Given all the current debate raging over JVM vs.
In general scripting languages have been looked down upon, but realistically the gap between scripting languages (and what you even mean by "scripting language") has been drastically narrowed to the point where it is increasingly less relevant. The only serious remaining issue is speed - and that's something Parrot can help fix, putting Perl, Python and Ruby code on a similar footing as Java and C# code running on their VMs. You'll take a small hit for using a higher level language, but it won't be as drastic as it is now.
Maybe all that GNOME discussion about
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
- Language neutrality
- Support for very high level language inter-operation (e.g. you can sub-class a Python object in Perl and call a method on the Perl class that gets invoked fromt he Python class).
- Deep support for multiple character sets, not just ASCII and Unicode.
- Perl 6
The last item might seem odd, but Perl 6 is definitely a language which needed some serious support. It's very ambitious, and a VM that didn't support its needs as completely as Parrot does would have exponentially complicated writing a compiler for it.That said, the combination of the two promises to be one of the most powerful development platforms released to date.
This is NOT a strong vs weak typing thing. This is a static vs dynamic typing thing. The strength of a type system has no relation to when it's enforced.
You can have all combinations: