Parrot: State of the VM

As Parrot’s architect, I have an exciting view of the potential that Parrot has to change how developers look at dynamic languages. Unfortunately there are several barriers that Parrot's community needs to overcome to turn our potential awesomeness into actual awesomeness. I’ll talk about where Parrot’s been, what we’re doing now and where I see Parrot going in the future, both as a platform for language development and experimentation and as a product for embedding into other, sometimes surprising, applications. Satellites may be involved.

In the retrospective, I’ll touch on some of our successes and some of the problems we’ve dealt with. Rakudo Perl 6 has been an excellent user, both by requiring a stable platform for development and by exposing bugs in our code and processes, which I’ll cover. Our current policy and tools for dealing with deprecations were motivated largely by Rakudo. They’ve also necessitated a move to a more sophisticated automated testing infrastructure capable of intelligently tracking updates and dependencies and reporting failures. (currently a wip)

I’ll also talk about our series of low-level redesigns and rewrites known collectively as “Lorito” and what they’ll mean for Parrot’s users. Lorito is essentially a microcode-like set of very simple instructions on top of which the bulk of Parrot will be implemented. I’ll cover the design inspirations for Lorito and the benefits that our users. This will include a 10,000 foot view of Lorito and its meta-object model, based on Jonathan Worthington’s 6model work. I’ll take a high-level look at our roadmap and talk what’s been done and what remains.

If any time is left, I’ll talk about what we’ve got in the pipeline and show off what our hackers have been doing.