A vision for Parrot

claird@lairds.com (Cameron Laird) writes:

this morning it struck me that it would be nice to have Parrot not only
run Perl 6 and similar byte code, but that any of the common interpreted
languages be compiled to this same byte code.

Then no matter whether running a Perl 6, Python, Ruby, Tcl maybe even
bash script the same interpreter library would be used. Then likely it
would already be in memory speeding up start time.
.
This thought inspired enthusiasm in others long ago–from
before it was named “Parrot”, at least.

Particularly myself; in fact, it was named Parrot precisely to represent its
language-agnosticism.

The thought is also behind why I wrote the Python::Bytecode module, why I
learnt Ruby, and why I’ve been asking interesting questions about access to
the Ruby AST.

I don’t think the reality is as far away as you imply.

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The problem with big-fish-little-pond situations is that you
have to put up with all these fscking minnows everywhere.
– Rich Lafferty