What Skills Do We Need to Finish Parrot?
James E Keenan
1. What code is still unwritten that we will need to have Parrot ready
to go (where "ready to go" is defined as: "ready for a Perl 6 alpha")?
(I'll leave aside the question of when *that* will be ready.)
2. What skills are needed to write that code? In particular, what
skills do we need that are currently in short supply?
I ask these questions because I want to know what specific aspects of
the Parrot project to focus on if I should run into people with skills I
don't have who could be induced to join the project.
kid51
Allison Randal
> Do we have answers to the following questions?
>
> 1. What code is still unwritten that we will need to have Parrot ready
> to go (where "ready to go" is defined as: "ready for a Perl 6 alpha")?
> (I'll leave aside the question of when *that* will be ready.)
The canonical list of subsystems that still need significant work are:
* IO
* Events
* Threads
* Compiler tools interface
* Object support
* Exceptions
> 2. What skills are needed to write that code? In particular, what
> skills do we need that are currently in short supply?
>
> I ask these questions because I want to know what specific aspects of
> the Parrot project to focus on if I should run into people with skills I
> don't have who could be induced to join the project.
Developers with C skills are always handy. People with general
experience in dynamic languages are also good: they pick up PIR quickly.
At the moment, many of the core systems are written in C. Long-term,
there are some good motivations for moving toward a smaller C core.
a) we want Parrot to have a small footprint with dynamically loaded
extensions for running in embedded environments (PDAs, cell phones,
networking hardware, etc)
b) one way to minimize the inferior runloop problem, is to only drop
down to the C level when absolutely necessary for direct interface to C
libraries or speed
c) odd, perhaps, but it seems to be easier to find eager volunteers to
work in PIR than in C (I guess that's a good sign for PIR's usability)
Allison
Chromatic
> Which leads to my next questions:
>
> Given a knowledge of a dynamic language (I believe there's one called
> Perl 5), what is the trajectory for learning PIR?
Patrick and I talked about this a little bit today, though more in the context
of how to use PIR and PGE and TGE to build compilers for languages.
> Is there any tutorial in the docs?
Not really.
> Is the "Parrot Essentials" book (still) of any use in this regard?
Yes, though it's missing some advanced features. We could certainly ask
O'Reilly if we could extract the tutorial section into community
documentation.
-- c
James Keenan
On Jan 31, 2007, at 4:48 PM, Allison Randal wrote:
> People with general experience in dynamic languages are also good:
> they pick up PIR quickly.
>
Which leads to my next questions:
Given a knowledge of a dynamic language (I believe there's one called
Perl 5), what is the trajectory for learning PIR?
Is there any tutorial in the docs?
Is the "Parrot Essentials" book (still) of any use in this regard?
Allison Randal
>
> Which leads to my next questions:
>
> Given a knowledge of a dynamic language (I believe there's one called
> Perl 5), what is the trajectory for learning PIR?
>
> Is there any tutorial in the docs?
There's docs/imcc/syntax.pod. Not a tutorial, but a decent introduction.
> Is the "Parrot Essentials" book (still) of any use in this regard?
It's still a good starting point, but the content needs to be updated. I
haven't yet been successful in getting O'Reilly to release those
chapters to the Parrot project for inclusion in the repository.
Failing that, a PIR tutorial is a good project for someone to take on.
You interested in working on it?
Allison
Klaas-Jan Stol
languages/PIR/docs/pirgrammar.pod (and a html version). As languages/PIR
aims to be a kind of reference PIR implementation (well, that's my goal
:-), it should come *very* close to the language that IMCC accepts.
Anyway, pirgrammar.pod is a human-readable, cleaned-up version of the
languages/PIR PGE implementation (no error handling). I also sent a
patch that embeds examples into it.
>
> Allison
klaas-jan
James Keenan
On Feb 6, 2007, at 12:07 PM, Allison Randal wrote:
>
> Failing that, a PIR tutorial is a good project for someone to take
> on. You interested in working on it?
>
Errrr ... I'm the one who *needs* the tutorial, not the one to write it.
Joshua Isom
On Feb 7, 2007, at 1:49 PM, chromatic wrote:
> That makes you a prime person to capture the questions it needs to
> answer!
> You can't evade the Responsibility Ponies that easily.
>
> -- c
Or at a minimum a prime candidate to start a pir faq(frequently asked
doesn't mean you need to know the answer to add a question).
Chromatic
That makes you a prime person to capture the questions it needs to answer!
Bernhard Schmalhofer
Another €0.02,
Bernhard
Dzema Dmitriy
> Failing that, a PIR tutorial is a good project for someone to take
> on. You interested in working on it?
>
I am writing a PIR bundle for Texmate editor and a compiler from my
own little prototype-based programming language. During my work i am
writing pir tutorial. I'll try to finish it as soon as possible.
You may send me a questions for a FAQ.
P.S. sorry for my bad english :)
-----------------------------------
Dzema Dmitriy
di...@ag.ru