Howdy Jon, This is a great question, that I talk about a bit in my recent talk "Introduction to Parrot" [0,1,2]. I would say that Parrot is optimized for dynamic languages, which have a lot more possibilities of things changing at runtime, so while you could create a static language on Parrot, it would not be very fast since Parrot doesn't know that you don't want all the features of a dynamic language.
I definitely see that a niche exists for static language on Parrot, but no one has really explored it. If you would like to spearhead that, I am sure many people would be interested and grateful. First person to write FORTRAN on Parrot gets mad props and a free beer from me. Duke [0] Video - http://ping.fm/7rGS5 [1] Slides - http://ping.fm/Qz4QO [2] mp3 - http://ping.fm/B8WHy On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 1:33 PM, Jon Gentle <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > I have been wondering for a few months now, how useful/appropriate is parrot > for static languages? If it's not, has there ever been any discussion about > a companion vm project? One that would not only be similar in design and > philosophy, but would integrate with parrot and enable static and dynamic > languages to coexist. > > The reason that I ask, is because some years ago, I worked on my own little > project called draak. It was aimed at being a compiler that didn't > understand a particular language, but at runtime would load and parse a > language's lex and parser from a text file and then compile it. I was able > to get all of that to work fairly well, but I never had a good intermediate > representation, instead I just used x86 asm as the output. In recent years, > I have gone back and forth on how to do a good IR, between using parrot, > something like llvm, and rolling my own, but I could never get enough worked > through to make a decision. My question above is spawned from liking the > concept and implementation that has been done so far with parrot, but never > sure if parrot would be good for static languages. While I was thinking > through that, I had some musing that if parrot didn't fit the bill, could > parrot have a companion project that would focus on static languages. That > would allow an entire dynamic/static language ecosystem to exist. > > I apologize if the question has been asked, discussed and answered before. > My google-fu is not as strong as it once was. > > -Jon Gentle > > _______________________________________________ > http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev > > -- Jonathan "Duke" Leto [email protected] http://leto.net _______________________________________________ http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
