Hi Jonathan, As always I do appreciate your optimism :-). I can understand how I come off as negative, and I don't mean to be, but I find it hard to express the situation I see parot in today. Lets try again.
Parrot, for better or worse, is and will be the 'second platform' for many languages. In order to be a convincing second platform, it has to be * better in some objective way, than the primary (CPython, MRI) * pretty much entirely compatible with the primary Now the second will by definition take vast amounts of tuits, which parrot does not have right now; and perhaps is not our primary goal anyway. The first, however, we can reach (I think). The main pain points of 'primary' interpreters are: * They're slow (embarrasingly so) * They still don't support real threading (global interpreter locks in ****** 2013) * They have idiosyncratic bindings to native libraries (maintained at great cost) * They have silly (and outdated) memory layout and garbage collector / refcounting schemes * They are buggy (ZendVM I'm looking at you). In short, they're lousy at the job of being virtual machines. In an ideal world, here parrot comes in. And parrot has a lot to offer: * threads (don't know how far along they are, though) * garbage collection (though memory layout, not so much) * native library binding (say what you like but NCI works) Unfortunately, it doesn't have speed and unbugginess. And I think a lot of the negativity towards parrot comes from these two issues, and they're hard to fix (partly because parrot now has a legacy of over 10 years, and partly because of hard). If parrot can be fast, modern, and mostly bug-free, and if it can convince people to compile their respective dynamic languages to it, then it has a bright future yet ahead. If it cannot, then the best it can hope to be is an -Ofun project for our little group. And I don't mean that negatively, either. It's a question of goals and expectations. Kind regards, Bart Wiegmans _______________________________________________ http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev