I'm preparing to give a talk on Parrot at FOSSCON in Philadelphia next
Saturday. This preparation makes me realize how much I don't understand
about Parrot. More specifically, how many questions I can't give
concise answers to. And, as I suggested in my YAPC talk, I suspect I'm
not alone.
So here are some questions I'd like to be able to answer. They are not
necessarily important questions. Their order is simply that in which
they came into mind. You will probably have better questions for which
you need answers; feel free to ask them.
1. Who first came up with the idea of Parrot as a register-based VM?
Was there extensive discussion at that time of the merits of register
machines vs. stack machines?
[On #IRC, allison attributed this to Simon Cozens and Dan Sugalski. Can
anyone provide more detail?]
2. Describe in one sentence the purpose of Winxed.
3. A Winxed snapshot has recently been included in the Parrot
distribution for the first time, and a winxed object is now linked to
the parrot executable during compilation. In one sentence, answer:
What is the criterion for determining why "external" software such as
Winxed is included in Parrot in that way?
4. Describe in one sentence the purpose of NQP. Describe in another
sentence the current status of the various flavors of NQP (nqp, nqp-rx,
etc.).
5. Is this an accurate and complete description of the type of files
which the 'parrot' executable can process?
.pir
.pasm
.pbc
6. Do we have a program which clearly demonstrates the concept of
interoperability of high-level languages implemented in Parrot?
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