[pypy-dev] reusing existing work: Parrot

Tobias Oberstein Tobias.Oberstein at gmx.de
Sun Feb 9 20:28:44 CET 2003


more by accidence, I came across the following stuff

http://www.parrotcode.org

which might be of interest when it comes to

 - reusing existing work in PyPy
 - focusing PyPy (whatever this means) and concentrating manpower
   ..

Parrot will be the new VM written from scratch for Perl6.
The developers claim that its generally suitable for
dynamically typed languages - which fits Python as well.

Also it is designed as an abstract register machine, which
they claim will provide better performance.

Btw.: JVMs and .NET CLI are stack-based VMs optimized for
statically typed languages.

Regarding targeting Parrot from Python, there has been some
work done:

http://www.amk.ca/conceit/parrot.html

As I understand it, the main thing lacking is a "port" of
Python objects (dicts,..) to Parrot, where there are "PMCs"
which are very similar to PyObject.

I have no stakes in either PyPy or Parrot - it's just my two
pence that it could pay to not reinvent another VM, but port
as much modules/objects to pure Python (which is all about PyPy
as I understood) and write a Python->Parott Bytecode emitter plus
complement with appropriate PMCs.

Greets,
Tobias



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