Generic VMs Key To Future of Coding

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister calls for generic VMs divorced from the syntactic details of specific languages in order to provide developers with some much-needed flexibility in the years ahead: 'Imagine being able to program in the language of your choice and then choose from any of several different underlying engines to execute your code, depending upon the needs of your application.' This 'next major stage in the evolution of programming' is already under way, he writes, citing Jim Hugunin's work with Python on the CLR, Microsoft's forthcoming Dynamic Language Runtime, Jython, Sun's Da Vinci Machine, and the long-delayed Perl/Python Parrot. And with modern JITs capable of outputting machine code almost as efficient as hand-coded C, the idea of running code through a truly generic VM may be yet another key factor that will shape the future of scripting."

Comments

Will we ever see Parrot?

[CRCulver]

I remember some years ago the elation people felt when Parrot was announced. At last, we could leverage the strengths of either Python or Perl--or whatever other interpreted languages--but work with a common interpreter. But then the hype started to die down, and the last edition of O'Reilly's book on the subject appeared over four years ago. Within the Python community, interest in Parrot seems completely dead. Are the Perl folks going it alone, and when might we see the project reach a successful deployment?

Re:Will we ever see Parrot?

[chromatic]

Patrick Michaud wrote a bare-bones Python implementation in eight hours. It doesn't support all of Python, but it supports a large amount -- and, to my knowledge, he'd never implemented a Python compiler or interpreter before. That project, Pynie, has languished for a while, as he's spending more time working on Rakudo (the Perl 6 implementation on Parrot), but it's a viable port just waiting for someone to work on it. Lua is functionally complete as of 5.1 (I believe), and Tcl, PHP, and Ruby are in progress.

You can play with the latest versions of all of these languages on Tuesday, 21 October, when we make our next monthly stable release (though partcl just moved to a separate repository, so you can check out the current version there on a different schedule).

LLVM plug

[Anonymous Coward]

article didn't include it, but this open source project seems to have similar goals

http://llvm.org/