At 01:36 PM 11/15/2001 +0000, Alberto Manuel Brandao Simoes wrote:
> I had a conference about .NET and, what a surprise... this big
> title is
>only another virtual machine.
Yup. We've all just got a bad case of hardware envy. :)
>I don't know what .MONO is trying to do,
They're trying to be a clone of .NET
>but
>isn't Parrot something like .NET, and usable that way?
Yep, absolutely. Our thrust is different than for .NET or the JVM, though.
..NET and the JVM are targeted at statically-typed languages. There's a lot
of analysis that can be done at compile time, and a fair number of
assumptions you can make at runtime.
Perl, on the other hand, is really dynamic. While you can check some stuff,
there's no guarantee that a lot of things won't necessarily change at
runtime. That means a lot of the checking that C or Java does at compile
time has to be done at runtime. Runtime checks are more expensive, and on
an architecture without support for it (like .NET or the JVM) you have to
do it with a series of VM opcodes. With Parrot we can do it as part of the
core architecture. Yeah, it does have some runtime cost (as does a lot
that's part and parcel of dynaic languages) but we pay only a little bit
compared to running on the JVM. (OTOH the JVM will run java programs faster
than parrot will, but that's fine as that's the whole point...)
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
