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Parrot 2.2.0 released
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 2.2.0 "Like Clockwork." Parrot (http://parrot.org/) is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages. Parrot 2.2.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site, or follow the download instructions at http://parrot.org/download. 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 2.2.0 News: - Core changes + Most internal allocations now use the GC + RNG non-randomness fixes + Elimination of much dead code - API changes + PMCs can now be initialized from an int + Many legacy ops are removed - Platforms + Sun cc and Intel icc support have been restored + Compiler invocation no longer goes through a Perl script - Tools + NCI thunks are now generated by self-hosted PIR code Many thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project. Our next scheduled release is 20 April 2010. Enjoy! (Log in to post comments)
Parrot 2.*2.*0 released Posted Mar 17, 2010 15:02 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
Becuase it isn't. The subject of the message seems to have a wrong version number. As opposed to the rest of the message and to the homepage.
Parrot 2.*2.*0 released Posted Mar 17, 2010 15:08 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Ah, you mean I was supposed to actually read the stuff I posted? Nobody ever told me that... I've updated things, apologies for the confusion.
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 17, 2010 15:21 UTC (Wed) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]
The version number suggests a fairly mature product, but is it used in
production somewhere? And what about Perl, will Perl5 be dropped and Perl6 (Rotaku?) be the only version?
I tried to find answers on the web pages and on wikipedia, but the whole
Can anyone explain the big picture? Or was that lost along the way?
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 17, 2010 16:16 UTC (Wed) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link]
I think the way things are going Parrot will reach 6.0 before Perl does :)
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 17, 2010 16:43 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
The big picture was lost when "Perl 6 Essentials" was published in 2003.
At this point, it really appears that all meaningful Perl development has moved back to Perl5.
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 17, 2010 17:05 UTC (Wed) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link]
Many of the meaningful new features in 5.10 and 5.12 and the Perl 5 ecosystem had origins in Perl 6. Certainly the pace of Perl 6 development outstrips the pace of Perl 5 development, and has throughout Rakudo's lifespan. (Even Perl 5's recent adoption of a monthly release cycle owes a lot to Rakudo and Parrot demonstrating that it's possible, useful, and desirable.)
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 17, 2010 17:22 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]
ugh this has been beaten to death. 2007 is calling, it wants its trolls back
everyone who actually cares about perl6 knows that it is alive and well
the teams have gone to great lengths to drumbeat releases on regular intervals and document their progress
both parrot and rakudo and doing great work with regards to making and advertising progress...indeed i don't know of many other open projects that are managed as well
that perl5 continues to go and grow is simply a testament to the diversity of the perl community
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 17, 2010 17:58 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (subscriber, #52523) [Link]
"everyone who actually cares about perl6"
What? All two of them?
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 18, 2010 12:26 UTC (Thu) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
Right now, perl6 is nothing more than php6 to the casual user: not installed by default, thus irrelevant.
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 17, 2010 19:39 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
I'm not trolling, just offering an answer OP's question. I think it's unarguable that a team that has published two books without even having a working language has lost sight of the big picture.
Also, given the output of the project so far, I think one could be forgiven for thinking that the Perl6 team's top priorities until now has been producing progress reports and selling books.
Funny you should mention 2007, it doesn't seem like much has changed. :) http://lwn.net/Articles/263386/
Anyhow, my best wishes to the entire team for April. I hope they manage to produce software that people actually want to use. We'll see!
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 17, 2010 22:02 UTC (Wed) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link]
The output of the project so far includes (as of tomorrow) 27 releases of Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot). There may be plenty to criticize, but "not releasing software" is not one of them. A better line of criticism is "Why is it necessary to reinvent regular expressions and spend a couple of years researching how to produce lexically scoped mutable grammars?" -- but once you understand why that's an interesting question, you'll probably have noticed the 27 releases of Rakudo.
I've had working software in Perl 6 for four and a half years.
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 17, 2010 22:24 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I don't understand the criticism of Perl 6 as not a "working language". It
has been included in Fedora 12
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Rakudo_Perl_6
They do very frequent releases on a regular schedule and it is already used
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 18, 2010 9:53 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
And what can I do with it?
Specifically, in Debian I now see parrot already included in Squeeze, Rakudo is still in Experimental, but 0 other packages depend on parrot.
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 18, 2010 10:09 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
You can write a Perl 6 program with it obviously :-) The formal release is
next month.
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 17, 2010 17:02 UTC (Wed) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link]
Perl 5 and Perl 6 both are under active development, and that will continue as long as people are willing to work on both projects. (You try predicting what volunteers find interesting.)
If you want to use Parrot in production, feel free! It's been in distros for a while. I can't give you a list of exactly who uses it and for what because that information's not visible to developers.
The current Rakudo plan is to have a big release at the end of April (modulo any schedule changes due to real life intruding on its lead developer) intended for end users. Like Parrot, Rakudo has had regular monthly releases since January 2007, each one better than the previous. Whenever you find that one of those releases meets your needs, you're very much welcome to use it. We tend not to believe that there's a single version that is the point where everyone should use it for everything, and we encourage you to make your own evaluation.
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 17, 2010 17:24 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]
awesome, i hope the april release coincides with some good documentation, because its not clear to me what is or isn't supported out of the synopses, which i presume have not changed since their original authoring
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 17, 2010 17:59 UTC (Wed) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link] The Synopses reflect the current design of the language; they get updated frequently, based on feedback from the multiple Perl 6 implementations under active development. If you skim them, you'll get a good understanding of the design of Perl 6. With that said, the Rakudo book is also under active development. We'll publish it to coincide with the Rakudo Star release. It'll introduce the Perl 6 features supported fully in Rakudo Star.
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 18, 2010 5:01 UTC (Thu) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link]
[hardcore perl fan here...]
> We tend not to believe that there's a single version that is the point where everyone should use it for everything, and we encourage you to make your own evaluation.
For me, it's a question of unlearning/relearning new features that are in flux. I wish someone would say "right... this version does these things, which will not change, be re-thought, or be re-designed. More features may be added but these *will* stay as they are".
In other words, I'm not holding off because the software is not stable, but I am looking for stable *semantics*.
[I also realise it's been a while since I tracked perl 6 closely enough to know if that is still a problem; apologies if not -- just correct me right here please!]
Parrot 2.2?? Posted Mar 18, 2010 18:52 UTC (Thu) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link]
> And what about Perl, will Perl5 be dropped and Perl6 (Rotaku?) be the
> only version?
I doubt that will happen any time soon. Perl 5 and Perl 6 are two different languages that have the misfortune of sharing the same name. They will probably coexist for many years to come.
will parrot be a universal plug-in language? Posted Mar 17, 2010 18:37 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
Will it be possible for applications to provide hooks for stuff to be done by plugins in parrot?
I.e., instead of GIMP devs building in scriptability in Scheme and in Python, could they just make it scriptable in parrot and then the operating system could translate Scheme, Parrot, and other languages to parrot?
This seems to be the big benefit of Parrot when they announced all those years ago, but I've never seen it mentioned anywhere.
Anyone know if it will be possible?
will parrot be a universal plug-in language? Posted Mar 17, 2010 20:00 UTC (Wed) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link]
It's possible, and it's still very much part of the plan. Parrot's current development focus is in making Rakudo Star successful, but one of Rakudo's long term goals is interoperability with Perl 5. To make that work, Parrot has to support enough interoperability that it's reasonable to support other dynamic languages.
This means, of course, that other languages need to be able to target Parrot, but there are several such implementations in progress now (and we've demonstrated interoperability between languages several times).
Parrot's embedding/extension interface hasn't seen much work, and it needs attention, but it hasn't been a priority lately because we haven't made it a priority. With that said, the Perl 5 interoperability has begun again, and a newer project is making a PL/Parrot interface for PostgreSQL, so that system will see more attention in the near future.
Parrot 2.2.0 released Posted Mar 17, 2010 18:48 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
> + Elimination of much dead code
Surely it's just resting? Pining for the fjords?
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