A vision for Parrot

[Manuel M. Garcia]

On Tue, 5 Nov 2002 22:10:04 +0100, Daniel Pfeiffer
<occitan at esperanto.org> wrote:

>Hi,
>
>this morning it struck me that it would be nice to have Parrot not only run Perl 6 and similar byte code, but that any of the common interpreted languages be compiled to this same byte code.
>
>Then no matter whether running a Perl 6, Python, Ruby, Tcl maybe even bash script the same interpreter library would be used.  Then likely it would already be in memory speeding up start time.
>
>And this would also ease cross language module/library inclusion.  Imagine instantiating some Python class from Perl!
>
>Apache would essentially have a mod_parrot.  Maybe, if this can be tested very hard, we'd even have a Parrot kernel module for all Unices supporting that.  Then exec() could perform compiled scripts right away, like machine code :-)
>
>coralament / best Grötens / liebe Grüße / best regards / elkorajn salutojn
>Daniel Pfeiffer

I think this was one of the early design goals of the people working
on Parrot.  In fact, the name Parrot is taken from a April Fools hoax
merging of the worst parts of Perl and Python.  But, having an
efficient common backend for several languages is a sound engineering
decision, so it is no longer a joke!

In fact I believe I read a "proof-of-concept" version of Python is
already running in Parrot.

.NET is already doing this for Windows.  Not too popular because the
only way to do it is to buy Visual Studio.NET or download the massive
free .NET runtime.  As Microsoft shoves .NET down more and more
throats, expect to see this at a computer near you.

There are some doubts about Parrot outside of the Perl community.
Larry Wall was adamant that Parrot would be a register machine, and
not a stack machine, but outside of the Perl community, people are
uncertain about Parrot's ability to do efficient register allocation.

Take this with a grain of salt, I avoid Perl whenever I can, and I get
all my Parrot news from Slashdot  :-P