Parrot 0.3.1 "Wart" Released!

On November 6th, 2005, Parrot pumpking Leo Tötsch released Parrot 0.3.1. See the Parrot 0.3.1 release announcement for more details or download Parrot 0.3.1 from the CPAN.

What is Parrot

Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for interpreted languages. Parrot will be the target for the final Perl 6 compiler, and is already usable as a backend for Pugs, as well as variety of other languages.

Under Development

To keep up to date on current developments, check out This week on Perl 6 by Matt Fowles and Piers Cawley which covers the Parrot and Perl 6 mailing lists. Piers's summaries will appear on this RSS feed first.

We just hit our 10,000th commit, and we're happy to report that as of late, the rate of parrot development has been increasing. Here's a short summary of what's going on now:

Design-wise, Chip Salzenberg is working on calling conventions with respect to exception handlers, while Matt Diephouse tackles namespaces, Joshua Hoblitt considers a rewrite of the configure system, and Jonathan Worthington is both designing and implementing high-level language debug segments and packfile PMCs. Leopold Tötsch has the lexical specification (PDD20) in his implementation queue, and has been improving parrot's Unicode support.

The Parrot Grammar Engine (PGE) is in a state of constant improvement, keeping Patrick Michaud out of trouble. Meanwhile ParTcl, Will Coleda's port of Tcl, continues to push parrot to implement new routines and has been quite helpful at finding garbage collector bugs. With Leo, Will continues smoking them out, hunting them down, and bringing them to justice. Allison Randal is continuing her implementation of Perl 1, a.k.a. 'Punie.'

Bernhard Schmalhofer has been revising the stale examples in the repository, updating them to provide a good starting point for learning parrot, and adding tests to make sure they are updated as parrot grows and changes. Jerry Gay has been adding tests to PGE, and has been trying to stay ahead of Patrick (so far, Patrick has been much too fast to catch.)

How to Get Involved

Parrot development takes place on the perl6-internals mailing list. If you follow this list, you'll be able to get an idea of what sort of things are needed. Subscribe by sending mail to perl6-internals-subscribe@perl.org or read the perl6-internals NNTP archive.

There is documentation in the docs subdirectory of the Parrot source, with an snapshot here of svn-latest documentation.

There is a list of TODO items.

Patches of all natures are welcome. See the patch FAQ for details.

View and manipulate bugs and TODO items at the Parrot bugs page.