Parrot hacker Jerry Gay released Parrot 0.6.1 on Tuesday. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to run dynamic languages efficiently, to allow them to interoperate in the same process, and to provide great compiler tools for building and modifying these languages.
This release is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the Lua and Perl 6 implementations continue to receive lots of attention. In particular, Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot) gets new features every week. This release includes basic IO, object delegation, basic multi-dispatch, and more. Second, we found some optimizations that speed up Rakudo (and almost every part of Parrot’s OO) by around 40%. That’s more features, faster, with less code and fewer bugs. What more could you want? (Oh yes, and parallel building works, so it even builds faster.)
The next release will be 20 May. I’m not sure what to expect yet, but we’ll probably have localization for error messages, hopefully some compiler improvements, and possibly even more speed improvements.
Excellent news, I can't wait to get home and grab a copy of the latest source to play around with.
One thing about Parrot that is hard (impossible) to figure out from the release notes, is how much of the Perl 6 language is complete? I wish the dev team used something like Trac, and had created Milestones, so we can see the percentage click up every time something gets done.
Not that other languages don't have problems. Ruby 1.9.0 is considered complete from a language point of view, but the implementation still has issues, and is recommended only for developers right now. No indication when 1.9.something will come out, and it will be ready for production.
@Tom, I agree completely. Patrick and Jerry are working on a milestone document akin those in Audrey's Pugs Apocrypha 1. We're also working on a way to make the test status more publicly visible; there are plenty of tests from the Pugs suite, but it's not clear how many of those Rakudo passes nor how many we expect it to pass.