On Sat, 2005-10-15 at 12:45 -0500, Bryan Burgers wrote: > What I find exciting about parrot is that (it sounds like to me) > you'll be able to run a perl6 file anywhere that has parrot, much like > Java. I think what Markus is getting at is for there to be a way to > display graphics through parrot everywhere parrot runs as well. Yes, > different modules are extremely important, because the programmer > deserves a choice, but some modules run someplaces, others run other > places - it'd be a good thing to have the absolute bare essentials run > everywhere.
I agree, but it's not an easy question: which bare essentials are those? How big is the screen on every device where Parrot runs? Is there hardware acceleration? Is there a text-mode console? Is there a framebuffer? How many colors? Is there a back buffer? What types of input devices are available? Does the platform have POSIX support? Does it have a MMU? Can it run a compiler from the program? Is there an existing graphics library on every platform we can use or will we have to write and maintain a superset of all graphics primitives we want to provide on every platform? Does the platform support tiling or overlapping windows? Does it manage resources automatically or leave that up to the programmer? -- c
