Allison Randal wrote:
Nicholas Clark wrote:
I guess that the most obvious current thing that ties Parrot to the Perl
community is that Parrot requires a copy of Perl to bootstrap, and all
the
build tools are written in Perl 5.
This is slated to change before the 1.0 release.
Since November I've been working on maintaining those of Parrot's
configuration and build tools written in Perl 5. Lately I've been
trying to recruit others to help in that process. The discussion in
this thread suggests that at some future point some or all of the Perl
scripts/modules I've been working on will be replaced with ... something
else.
This, of course, makes me wonder what I'm doing now and, more
importantly, makes me wonder what to say to other people with Perl 5
skills who want to help with the Parrot project.
This is not simply an ego thing on my part. I've written very little of
the Perl 5 tools and taken on maintenance of a bit more, but one thing I
realize is how much of Parrot's source code is written in Perl 5. How
much of that must eventually be replaced?
And who is going to maintain it? In my experience Perl 5 programmers
are relatively abundant while C programmers (these days) are rarer. How
many people might actually learn the yet-to-be-designed HLL that would
presumably replace a lot of the Perl 5 we currently use?
So, can someone draw a roadmap of:
-- *which parts* of Parrot's configuration and build tools *need* to be
replaced with something else;
-- *why* that replacement is necessary;
-- *when* in the design process that replacement must take place; and
-- *how* that replacement will be maintained going forward from there?
If this is already discussed in some of the design documents, I would
appreciate a link. Thank you very much.
kid51
