4 ms·

Parrot's been claiming that it's slow and incomplete now, but a solution to that is just around the corner for a few years. Maybe that's true, but I think that

by avar 16y ago

Parrot's been claiming that it's slow and incomplete now, but a solution to that is just around the corner for a few years. Maybe that's true, but I think that'd be the main concern of any compiler writer thinking of targeting it. It's not a mature platform with known pros and cons, unlike the JVM or LLVM. I hope it all turns out for the best and Parrot delivers on its promises. But I can see why e.g. the PHP team isn't rushing to target it given the state of its native languages.

j_baker 16y ago
These things take a long time. Heck, it might even be a bit early to call LLVM mature. Sure, it supports a C and C++ compiler, but I don't think it has anything production-ready for much else.
- avar 16y ago
  It's in extensive use by Apple on the iPhone and in XCode, and outside Apple. The JVM is also well understood and widely deployed. By comparison the Parrot project with the widest use is Rakudo, which is still just at a testing stage. Maybe there's some larger user of Parrot that I haven't heard about, so correct me if I'm wrong.
  - amalter 16y ago
    fyi - with the JDK7 - the JVM can also target the LLVM (for JIT'ing) through Project Zero (http://openjdk.java.net/projects/zero/ http://openjdk.java.net/projects/zero/) One Bytecode to rule them all, One Bytecode to find them, One Bytecodeto bring them all and in the darkness bind them :-)
  - chromatic 16y ago
    Lua 5.2 has been feature complete on Parrot for years. Like LLVM and the JVM, we'll keep tuning and improving and fixing bugs and adding features to make language implementation easier, but the correlation between "maturity" and "use" is strong.
    - avar 16y ago
      That's interesting. Are there any recent benchmarks of Lua on Parrot v.s. LuaJIT? The only thing I could find was this from 2007 where it was ~2 orders of magnitude slower: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.internals/2007/09/msg40359.html http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.internals/2007/09/... The URL to the benchmark script was broken so I couldn't run it. Don't get me wrong, I think Parrot's very neat. But I could see why compiler implementors would be sceptical of it since it's not feature complete, and seemingly not very optimized. So there's a lot of unknowns.

by avar 16y ago

j_baker 16y ago

These things take a long time. Heck, it might even be a bit early to call LLVM mature. Sure, it supports a C and C++ compiler, but I don't think it has anything production-ready for much else.

avar 16y ago
It's in extensive use by Apple on the iPhone and in XCode, and outside Apple. The JVM is also well understood and widely deployed. By comparison the Parrot project with the widest use is Rakudo, which is still just at a testing stage. Maybe there's some larger user of Parrot that I haven't heard about, so correct me if I'm wrong.
- amalter 16y ago
  fyi - with the JDK7 - the JVM can also target the LLVM (for JIT'ing) through Project Zero (http://openjdk.java.net/projects/zero/ http://openjdk.java.net/projects/zero/) One Bytecode to rule them all, One Bytecode to find them, One Bytecodeto bring them all and in the darkness bind them :-)
- chromatic 16y ago
  Lua 5.2 has been feature complete on Parrot for years. Like LLVM and the JVM, we'll keep tuning and improving and fixing bugs and adding features to make language implementation easier, but the correlation between "maturity" and "use" is strong.
  - avar 16y ago
    That's interesting. Are there any recent benchmarks of Lua on Parrot v.s. LuaJIT? The only thing I could find was this from 2007 where it was ~2 orders of magnitude slower: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.internals/2007/09/msg40359.html http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.internals/2007/09/... The URL to the benchmark script was broken so I couldn't run it. Don't get me wrong, I think Parrot's very neat. But I could see why compiler implementors would be sceptical of it since it's not feature complete, and seemingly not very optimized. So there's a lot of unknowns.