Hi there!
I´m a java programmer and I´m not really experienced with perl.
But I´ve searched a long time for a system like .NET that can´t be controlled by Microsoft through Patents.
Do be aware that Microsoft may still hold patents that affect Parrot, as might IBM, HP, and whoever owns what used to be Bell Labs these days. Amongst others. Independent development is *no* protection against patents. Just ask the other guys who independently invented the telephone. (Remember them? No? Neither does anyone else :)
I really like languages which are deployed compiled to bytecode, no problems with ABI-changes or with compiliers, once compiled link everywhere. Thats the reason why I linke Java really much, but there are some points, which are really showstoppers: *Java isnt free, *Swing is toooo slow to be useful.
Erm--bytecode doesn
I think that parrot could be the Gnu-version of .NET and could be a realy benefit for the whole opensource-world. No 20 runtimes need to be installed on a system - parrot would do the job better than each could alone (Because if many apps rely on parrot the JIT will be tuned by guys from IBM ;-) ).
We thought the same about Java when it came out. Alas you'll find a half-dozen different JVMs installed on some systems. (Not, mind, that I want to do the same, but it is possible that it'll happen)
But in my opinion parrot needs a more complete "classpath" that perl5 currently has.
Hrm? I'm completely lost here. Library search functionality should be at least as good, if not better, than perl 5, and it's been my experience that perl 5's library search capabilities were better than any Java I've had the misfortunte to deal with. Might just have had some bad experiences.
So, my question: Is it planned to include a complete classpath into parrot, including gui, network, db, sound functionality
No. Networking yes, probably some DB functionality (at least DBI and xDBM style access, though unlikely no actual SQL DB drivers. Possibly flat file SQL access, we'll see), but no sound or GUI stuff. That's all very platform-specific, or really really ugly.
Not to say that there won't be good cross-platform libraries--I'd be thrilled if there was a good Tk or wXwindows library for Parrot, but we're not going to ship with them.
Please let me know what you think about the idea to include a "complete" classpath into parrot.....
If you want a complete *library* shipping with Parrot, you're going to be rather disappointed I'm afraid. -- Dan
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Dan Sugalski even samurai
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