On 5 September 2011 22:02, Christoph Otto <[email protected]> wrote: > First of all, Parrot isn't mature and stable enough to justify our > deprecation policy. Mature projects with a stable API and lots of > production users need a deprecation policy like ours. We need to take > out the trash. Parrot has evolved from a heritage where it was > acceptable for our C interface to be a batch of poorly-encapsulated > functions that poked into Parrot's internals in a fairly indiscriminate > way. Until we've moved completely away from the code from that era, we > need to get that mentality out of our tree. We have all kinds of junk > that we're "supporting" because it happened to exist when we adopted our > policy, and us keeping it around isn't doing ourselves any favors. We > need to start thinking of DarkPAN for Parrot as a fairy tale and avoid > invoking its name in policy discussion. We can only help users when we > know they exist. Silent users will have to either make themselves known > or deal with it.
Unsurprisingly, I agree. I went into GSoC knowing that Parrot had issues and no real interop story, but what I found was worse than I had expected. > While I'm cutting down our roadmap goals, I also need to add one. HLL > interoperability is a core feature of Parrot that's been broken/missing > since 2008. We need to get it documented and working again, and it needs > to be a roadmap goal even if doesn't have a champion. HLL interop is a > core differentiator of Parrot, a major selling point, and for HLL > implementers something that no other VM can offer. We need to make this > happen if Parrot is to have a distinguising feature that will attract > users apart from hosting Rakudo. If we can't get Tene++ motivated enough > to get on this, someone else needs to pick up where he left off. HLL > interop is too important to drop. Exactly. Parrot has absolutely no interesting features about its competitors at the moment. Current "dream parrot" only has HLL interop as a distinguishing feature, it won't beat good VMs on other things. It's a little sad that the best interop you can get atm. is on the JVM (much better than parrot's).
