Welcome to the Official Parrot Wiki (Workplace)

• Here is the Parrot home page.
• Here is the Official Perl 6 Wiki.

News and Events

Also see the "Latest Planet Parrot RSS Feed Headlines" section at the bottom of this page.

• Parrot 0.6.4 was released on 2008-07-15
• BuildBot set up to watch SVN and build on commit.
• Release Schedule 2008
• Hackathon YAPC::NA 2007
• Development Dashboard
• Updating to use the New Object Model
• Build status
• OSCON 2008 Talk Proposals
• YAPC::NA::2008 Talk Proposals
• YAPC::EU::2008 Talk Proposals

Also see Archived News and Events.

What is Parrot?

Parrot is a virtual machine — a software cpu — originally designed for Perl 6. It exists because other VMs, like the JVM and CLR, don't have support for 100% of the features of some more dynamic languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby. And while support for these features has improved in the past couple of years, leading to projects like IronPython and Silverlight, these VMs are still designed primarily for static languages.

See the Field Guide to Parrot Porters

Contributing to Parrot

You can contribute to Parrot in many ways:

• Building Parrot on your favorite platform
• Perhaps contribute a buildslave on your favorite platform for the parrot BuildBot
• Adding new features (see the TODO list)
• Smoking Parrot
• RFP: Parrot Needs Better Smoke Reports
• Adding tests (see the current smoke reports and Code Coverage statistics)
• Checking, updating and adding documentation
• Cage Cleaning
• Perl 5 Components
• Perl 5 Components: Clean Up TODO Items
• Perl 5 Components: Test Coverage of Configuration and Build Tools
• C Components
• Fixing GC Bugs
• Write tests.
• Convert existing tests to parrot

In each case you will need to get the Parrot source. There are several ways to do this, including Subversion, SVK and rsync. For full details see the Download page on the main Parrot web site.

• The C You Need to Understand the Parrot Internals

Parrot-Related Projects

Parrot-targeting compilers

There are currently compilers (in various stages of completion) that target Parrot in the Parrot source tree for the following languages:

• abc
• Befunge
• Eclectus
• Lisp
• Lua
• JavaScript (ECMAScript)
• nqp (not quite perl)
• Perl 6
• Pipp (Pipp is Parrot's PHP)
• Pynie (Python)
• Ruby
• Scheme
• Tcl

Other Parrot projects (not language-specific)

• Continuous Build using BuildBot
• Make Smoke
• Make Splint
• Cage Cleaning
• Code Coverage
• Tim Bunce's DBI-on-Parrot
• CFFI do NCI with Lisp syntax
• wickedWiki a wiki written in PIR (requires a login. :| )
• mod_parrot

Parrot Info and Docs

• Official Parrot Website
• Parrot Presentations
• Publications on Parrot
• Metacommitters Guide -- committed to repo
• Release Manager Guide -- committed to repo
• Parallel Development Requirements
• PMC Documentation Guidelines
• PDD15 TODO
• Sub Adverbs Notes
• Platforms we're working on
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC): #parrot
• Submit bugs, patches or todo items to parrotbug at parrotcode dot org
• Take part in the discussion of porting Parrot on parrot-porters at perl dot org
• Parrot Development on Windows
• Release Planning
• A foundation for Parrot
• Inter-HLL Mapping Notes

Parrot Development as of release 0.5.1

The graph is generated from a Perl program ( svnlog2graph.pl ) originally written by the Pugs team and modified slightly for Parrot. See perldoc svnlog2graph.pl for info about how to run the program.

PIR Info

PIR is the Parrot Intermediate Representation, used for writing language compilers. Information about PIR can be found at the following links:

• The PIR Language Reference Manual
• PIR Tutorial and FAQ
• PIR Syntax Cleanup Proposals
• How to convert PIR to C
• A PASM Grammar

Parrot Compiler Tools

The implementation of the case-study language of the PCT tutorial, named "Squaak", can be found here: squaak.zip.

The RT Request Tracker

RT is what Parrot uses to track patches, bugs, todo items and any other issues arising from Parrot development.

• Useful RT Queries
• How to use RT from the command line

The Parrot Design Documents (PDDs) are tracked separately at launchpad.net.

Wiki 101

Please feel free to add or modify pages — even this one — as you see fit. That's the idea of a Workspace.

• If you'd like an introductory tour of the Socialtext Workspace, start here.
• Visit Recent Changes every once in a while to see what's new, and see Socialtext Documentation for tips to use this Workspace.
• Make links by putting words or phrases in square brackets. Click on Edit at the top of the page to see some examples.

Latest Planet Parrot RSS Feed Headlines

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