[ CC'ed all + perl6-internals so fullquote ]
Mark Hahn wrote:
I have been looking over Parrot in consideration as a foundation for Prothon. Let me give you some of my thoughts and ask another question or two. Feel free to pass this on to any or all on the Parrot team.
Prothon is a small development effort. While many have been contributing to the intellectual design, there are only two of us on the development team at this time. This means we don't have the luxury of "trying out" Parrot as a research project on the side. We need to make a decision to go with Parrot or not. So this is a big decision for us.
We have been using the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) as our foundation and it has been a very pleasant experience. I have been doing the main development track in Windows' Visual Studio and it has run on all the other platforms with barely a hitch. We would be giving up APR for Parrot. So this isn't an argument of homegrown vs. Parrot, it is APR versus Parrot.
Now let me ask you about my concerns.
1) The talks I read on the site mentioned many exiciting features to come like parsing and optimizing for different languages. These talks are two years old and it doesn't seem to me like there has been any progress in the two years since the talks were given. What progress has been made in the last two years? What is the current schedule for Perl 6? How realistic is that schedule? What is the schedule for a real library? How realistic is that schedule? How many developers are actively contributing to Parrot every week?
There are currently discussions on plans to get Perl6 running within a year. But the first language, Parrot will run is hopefully Python. There are around 10 contributors, but currently it's rather quiet.
Hopefully Dan will answer the other questions.
2) I downloaded the CVS tree and I couldn't find any build instructions for
windows.
README.win32
... I didn't look very hard but I couldn't find any C files.
Most is in /src. /classes holds another bunch of files named .pmc, which are converted to .c
I saw a lot of .pod files. What are those? The faq said Parrot was written in C.
That's Perl documentation format, plain text with some markup for headings and such.
3) Is there someone on the develpment team who could hold my hand in the beginning to get me going with Parrot in Visual Studio? After a brief period I'm sure I could not only stand on my own but I could become a main support point for Parrot on win32/VS.
Win32 people, please answer ;) - That would be really great.
If you don't mind, let me make a quick sales pitch. Prothon has been developed by some of the top Python minds and is turning out to be an superior alternative to the mythical Python 3. Don't let the prototype-based versus class-based stuff confuse you. Prothon can do everything Python can do including class-based designs. Check out the Prothon tutorial and mailing list archives. I think you will be hearing a lot more about Prothon as time goes on.
I'm currently tied up with getting Python running. I'll have a look at it in August.
leo
