Am 31.01.2011 15:30, schrieb jerry gay:
the concern with parrot supporting the new nqp is that any tools we write using nqp can be easily ported to any other vm.
The problem with Microsoft Office supporting open standards is that it breaks the lock-in relation to its customers.
I personally hate that approach.
however altruistic, portability from parrot to other backends is not currently one of parrot's goals. in fact, chromatic, myself, and others believe it may be harmful to parrot's future to support portability of nqp-based parrot tools to other backends. parrot is simply not in a position to compete with more mature virtual machines yet, and the risk that the new nqp's portability poses is significant.
I also see a chance: if there's no thread of a lock-in, the potential costs of starting a parrot-based project are much lower, because you have the option to migrate away if necessary.
From a philosophical point the question needs be asked (and answered) if parrot wants to be an open or a closed platform. So far I had the impression it was striving to be an open platform, but these remarks from chromatic and particle make me seriously doubt that. I'd like to hear the opinions from other parrot developers on this point.
none of this prevents parrot from continuing to use the existing nqp-rx. it is likely that no change to parrot's nqp-based toolchain is necessary, however small changes may be desired (or required) to make clear the distinction between the new nqp and nqp-rx. parrot may not even need to fork nqp-rx, if the nqp team agrees to give over ownership of nqp-rx to parrot, or agrees to give parrot folks liberal commit rights to nqp-rx.
I don't know of any cases where parrot developers have asked for access to nqp-rx, and have been denied it. So I guess it boils down to "no problem".
In fact I've pointed out that option myself: http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2011-01-31#i_3237158 (though I'm not entitled to speak for the nqp team as a whole).
Cheers, Moritz _______________________________________________ http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
