I announced last week the release of Parrot 0.5.0, a major milestone in the development of the Parrot virtual machine. The largest accomplishment in this release is the development of a powerful new object system which we believe is capable of serving as the foundation for several modern languages running atop Parrot, including Ruby and Perl 6.
This new object system — known in Parrot circles as PDD 15 — was a dependency for Parrot’s compiler tools, specifically Parrot’s AST.
With PDD 15 in place, well-tested, and stable, Patrick Michaud has in the past week made tremendous progress on Parrot’s compiler tools. He’s written a Perl 6 on Parrot ROADMAP.
An early milestone there is the completion of a language called NQP, which is a simplified version of Perl 6 built on Parrot which is powerful enough to use to build other compilers. Previously, the canonical way of writing a compiler for Parrot was to use PIR, Parrot’s native high-level language. That worked, but PIR is a line-oriented assembly language despite some syntactic sugar, so it can occasionally lead to verbose code. You might remember that a few months ago, we made tremendous progress to make the Perl 6 implementation pass the Perl 6 sanity tests (see Adding a Feature to Perl 6 on Parrot); progress slowed when it was clear that NQP would improve our work tremendously.
As of yesterday, NQP
is powerful enough to write real compilers. Within the Parrot source tree,
languages/abc is an implementation of the Unix
What’s next? Migrating the existing Perl 6 implementation from PIR to NQP. Then the fun begins.
Congrats Anyway, I'm missing is: what's up with pugs? Was kp6 merged with NQP? What about the haskell parser/interpreter?
@riffraff, I don't follow Pugs, but as I understand it there haven't been many Haskell hackers to make progress on that implementation recently. kp6 (Perl 6 on Perl 5 and other non-Parrot, non-Pugs backends) is still working. I believe the NQP connection is that both projects are looking into sharing a common AST representation.