On 2/7/06, chromatic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tuesday 07 February 2006 14:17, Yuval Kogman wrote: > > De-facto we have people running PIL on javascript. > > It works more than parrot does. > > No, it works *differently* from Parrot, just as an LR parser works differently > from an LR parser. > > Don't make the mistake of thinking "Wow, it took Parrot X months to get a > working PGE, while the Pugs version only took Y weeks", especially because > the Pugs version had the benefit of looking at *already designed, debugged, > and tested* Parrot code.
The Pugs project and the Parrot project have had very different goals actually (at least Pugs did from the early days). Pugs aimed to be able to evaluate Perl 6 code, as a way of testing the language features and design. It did not really attempt (until the PIL work began) to provide a VM for Perl 6 to run on. And even the PIL work began as a way to strip Perl 6 down to a more managable core calculus which was easier to interpret, the multiple backends seemed to grow out of that as a side-effect. So I guess what i am saying is that I agree with you, comparing Pugs development to Parrot development does not make sense. However, I think we arrive at that conclusion from different angles. It seems to me that Pugs has taken a top-down (more language centric) approach, and Parrot has taken a more bottom-up (runtime/VM centric approach), and in my eyes, there is a big gapping hole in the middle (see my response to Allison's post for details about the "big gapping hole"). Much of what Yuval is proposing is ways to fill that hole and to decompose and refactor the current Perl 6 development process so that we can have a real production Perl 6 to play with that much sooner. But also have a Perl 6 that some PhD canidate can re-write the type-checker for his thesis project or that some volunteer hobbiest can re-implement the core in FORTH or some open source hacker can hack the circular prelude to make the Schwartzian transformation that much quicker and efficient. IMHO breaking down the project into smaller more digestable chunks carries as much risk of failure as putting all the eggs into single Parrot nest. At the very least, this is a debate worth having, especially since we have all been waiting very patiently for so many years now. Once again... Respectfully, Stevan
