Parrot: State of the VM
By Christoph Otto (cotto)
Date: Wednesday, 29 June 2011 11:00
Duration: 50 minutes
Target audience: Intermediate
Language:
Tags: langauges parrot rakudo vm
You can find more information on the speaker's site:
As Parrot’s architect, I have an exciting view of the potential that Parrot has
to change how developers look at dynamic languages. Unfortunately there are
several barriers that Parrot’s community needs to overcome to turn our
potential awesomeness into actual awesomeness. I’ll talk about where Parrot’s
been, what we’re doing now and where I see Parrot going in the future, both as
a platform for language development and experimentation and as a product for
embedding into other, sometimes surprising, applications. Satellites may be
involved.
In the retrospective, I’ll touch on some of our successes and some of the
problems we’ve dealt with. Rakudo Perl 6 has been an excellent user, both by
requiring a stable platform for development and by exposing bugs in our code
and processes, which I’ll cover. Our current policy and tools for dealing with
deprecations were motivated largely by Rakudo. They’ve also necessitated a move
to a more sophisticated automated testing infrastructure capable of
intelligently tracking updates and dependencies and reporting failures.
(currently a wip)
I’ll also talk about our series of low-level redesigns and rewrites known
collectively as “Lorito” and what they’ll mean for Parrot’s users. Lorito is
essentially a microcode-like set of very simple instructions on top of which
the bulk of Parrot will be implemented. I’ll cover the design inspirations for
Lorito and the benefits that our users. This will include a 10,000 foot view of
Lorito and its meta-object model, based on Jonathan Worthington’s 6model work.
I’ll take a high-level look at our roadmap and talk what’s been done and what
remains.
If any time is left, I’ll talk about what we’ve got in the pipeline and show
off what our hackers have been doing.
- chromatic
- Chip Salzenberg (Chip)
- Jon Gentle (atrodo)
- Stephen Scaffidi (hercynium)
- Lawrence Hixson (Larry)
- Brock Wilcox (awwaiid)
- Todd Olson
- Matt Phillips (mattp)
- Ed Deloye
- jerry gay (particle)
- Kevin Polulak (soh_cah_toa)
- Todd Rinaldo (toddr)
- Robert Threet (RAT)
- Kevin Shaum
- Sam Vilain (mugwump)
- James E Keenan (kid51)
- Dan Wright (ehdonhon)
- Solomon Foster (colomon)
- Christoph Otto (cotto)
- Brian Gernhardt (benabik)
- James Engel (Jim)
- Bruce Gray (Util)
- Kartik Thakore (kthakore)
- Marcus Del Greco
- G. Wade Johnson (gwadej)
- Mary Ehlers
- John Lightsey (J.D.)
