Where have all the Parrot gone?

We've stopped posting to this blog, but we're not done working on Parort. If you're looking for more Parrot blogging goodness, head over to parrot.org or planet.parrot.org.

Less than a week to 1.0

You should be following parrot.org for all your parroty goodness, but in case this blog is your main connection...

...1.0 is due on Tuesday next week!

Parrot 0.9.1 "Final Countdown" released!

o/~ We're leaving together,

       but still its farewell o/~

o/~ And maybe we'll come back,

       To earth, who can tell? o/~

o/~ I guess there is no one to blame

       We're leaving ground

           Will things ever be the same again? o/~

o/~ It's the Final Countdown...

       The Final Countdown  o/~

--Europe, "The Final Countdown"

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.9.1

"Final Countdown." Parrot (http://parrot.org/) is a virtual machine aimed

at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 0.9.1 is available via CPAN (soon), or follow the download

instructions at http://parrotcode.org/source.html.  For those who would like to develop on

Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion on

the source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

Parrot 0.9.1 News:

- Implementation

  + Support for portable 'Inf', 'NaN' and -0.0

  + pbc_disassemble prints constants in constants table

  + New experimental BigNum implementation

  + Pair is now a dynamic loadable PMC

  + Various function name sanification

  + New implementation of Strings component

  + Replace various PMC value union access code by VTABLE method invocations

  + Replace various PMC value unions by ATTRibutes

  + Removed SArray PMC. Use FixedPMCArray instead.

- Documentation

  + Book

    - updates to Chapter 2 (getting started)

    - updates to Chapter 3 (PIR basics)

    - updates to Chapter 4 (PIR subroutines)

    - updates to Chapter 10 (HLLs)

    - updates to Chapter 12 (opcodes)

  + Function documentation

  + Pod documentation style modernized; no longer Perl 5 style.

  + PMC has an additional acronym: Poly Morphic Container

  + The DOD (Dead Object Detection) acronym is no longer used;

    use 'GC' to refer to the Garbage Collector component.

- Compilers

  + IMCC

    - :named flag can now take string registers as argument

    - A single '=cut' directive is now ignored (without initial Pod directive)

    - :vtable subs now have proper access to 'self' pseudo variable

- Languages

  + add new 'Pod' documentation parser

  + Pipp (PHP implementation):

    - Pipp is now at http://github.com/bschmalhofer/pipp

    - support for 'print', 'dirname', 'implode', 'str_replace',

    - various grammar fixes

  + ECMAScript

    + add 'quit', 'readline' builtins

    + fix 'Boolean' type and 'print' builtin

  + Lua

    - left the nest and is now at http://github.com/fperrad/lua/

  + Rakudo

    - left the nest and is now at http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/

    - build instructions can be found at http://tinyurl.com/rakudo

  + lazy-k

    - left the nest and is now at http://github.com/bschmalhofer/lazy-k.git

  + unlambda

    - left the nest and is now at http://github.com/bschmalhofer/unlambda/

  + WMLScript

    - left the nest and is now at http://github.com/fperrad/wmlscript.git

  + removed Zcode implementation

- Tools

  + pmc2C

    - ATTRs are now inherited automatically in subclassing PMCs

- Deprecations

  + Parrot_readbc, Parrot_loadbc renamed to Parrot_pbc_read, Parrot_pbc_load.

  + .HLL_map directive in favour of 'hll_map' method on Parrot interpreter

  + Data::Escape library

- Tools

  + pbc_disassemble options added

  + pbc_dump renamed from pdump

- Miscellaneous

  + Parrot is now Copyright Parrot Foundation

  + Parrot's SVN repository is now hosted at https://svn.parrot.org

  + Various code cleanups, consting, 64-bit incompatibilities and other bug fixes

Many thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors

for supporting this project.  Our next scheduled release is 17 March 2009.

Enjoy!

Readers Needed!

One of our key requirements for the release next Tuesday is improved documentation. Documentation is key, because it's the doorway through which new users will enter the world of Parrot. I've been doing a lot of work on documentation recently, along with several of the other developers. The problem is that from inside the project we can't always see where the holes are, and what the confusing bits are going to be. So, I'm asking for a little help from people who aren't current Parrot users or developers:

We need you!

We need people to read over the documentation and find the problem spots. What parts are confusing? What material isn't well covered, or isn't covered at all? What do you wish we talked about more? What information do you need in order to get started working with Parrot?

You can check out the source repository using SVN from https://svn.parrot.org/parrot/trunk/, you can find our documentation in the docs/ directory. Many of the files here, although not all of them, are used to populate our online documentation too (the online documentation has it's own problems too). We have a comprehensive book in development in the directory docs/book/, which contains a lot of material arranged in a linear narrative. All these things need some help.

We need suggestions, comments, even questions. Because answering your questions will help us to identify the information that is missing from our docs. We need patches, if you're able and want to contribute. Leave comments here on this blog with ideas, open a ticket at trac, or post a message to our mailinglist. It doesn't matter how you send us your reviews and your fixes, so long as you send a lot of them! We need help from readers and reviewers, especially people who aren't current Parrot users or developers, people who don't already have the answers. We need your help.

svn repository move

Heads up! In the short term, parrot's svn repository will be relocating from perl.org to parrot.org.

When this happens, there will be a small amount of downtime, and after that you'll be able to keep working with a simple 'svn switch' in your checkout.

We were going to try to squeeze this in today, but that's been postponed. More details on the schedule as they become available.

Parrot 0.8.2 "Feliz Loro" Released!

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.8.2
"Feliz Loro." Parrot
is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 0.8.2 is available via CPAN
(soon), or follow the download
instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help
develop Parrot itself, we recommend using href="http://subversion.tigris.org/">Subversion on
our source code repository to get the latest
and best Parrot code.

Parrot 0.8.2 News:

- Implementation
  + fixed lexical semantics
  + added the 'capture_lex' opcode
  + added automatic resume for nonfatal exceptions
  + added multidispatch cache
  + applied miscellaneous performance improvements, including startup time
  + fixed several bugs and leaks found by Coverity Scan
  + removed race conditions from parallel testing
- Compilers
  + IMCC
    - removed undocumented .param int  =>  syntax
    - .line directive now only takes an integer argument
    - new .file directive to specify the file name being compiled
  + PCT
    - properly handles lexical generation and closure semantics
    - uses :subid instead of name lookups to reference PAST::Block nodes
    - added PAST::Control node type (exception handlers)
  + PGE
    - add support for  and  assertions
    - Match objects use Capture PMC instead of Capture_PIR
  + PIRC
    - add macro handling to PASM mode
    - disable vanilla register allocation in PASM mode, but do allow optimization
    - add tests and bug fixes
    - first bits of bytecode generation. No sub calling/returning yet.
- Languages
  + Rakudo
    - fixed lexical handling and recursion
    - refactored subtypes implementation
    - support for quotes with multi-character delimiters
    - implemented list slices (Positional role)
    - list assignment
    - reduction meta operators
    - hyper meta operators
    - cross meta operators
    - more builtin functions
    - added Nil type
    - basic support for protos
    - iterator on filehandle objects
    - basic support for exception handlers
    - warn
  + Lua
    - added complex & mathx libraries
    - merged LuaClosure & LuaFunction PMC
  + Pipp
    - added support for a return value from user defined functions
    - added incomplete implemention of 'require_once'
  + Ecmascript
    - parser fixes, parses spidermonkey's top level test/shell.js
- Deprecations
  + PARROT_API is now PARROT_EXPORT
  + PIR
    - :lexid is now :subid
    - .arg is now .set_arg
    - .result is now .get_result
    - .yield (in .begin/end_yield) is now .set_yield
    - .return (in .begin/end_return) is now .set_return
    - .namespace x / .endnamespace x syntax is removed
  + Capture_PIR (runtime/parrot/library/Parrot/Capture_PIR.pir)

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors
for supporting this project. Our next release is 20 January 2009.

Enjoy!

Parrot development speed

Yesterday there was some converation on #parrot about our development momentum; since I had the numbers easily available I put together a small chart:



This shows the number of commits to the Parrot repository within any given month; the regression line shows the (linear) rate of increase over the past two years.

So, not only are we making progress on Parrot, but measured by commits the rate of progress is increasing as well.