Parrot book

Andrew Whitworth wknight8111 at gmail.com
Fri Apr 10 11:43:14 UTC 2009


On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 6:15 AM, register reg.ini <register72 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Are you going to add a chapter on Parrot's internals? I am thinking
> about some material that could be more useful to people interested directly
> in the development of Parrot rather than people involved in the development
> of languages for the VM.
> Especially something about the implementation of calling convections would
> be very interesting.

I thought about adding something like that, but never really got the
idea off the ground. Plus, when I was interesting, a number of major
subsystems were being overhauled so it didn't make sense to write
about them and then have to go back and rewrite it all.

Now might be a slightly different time though, and it might be a good
idea to write up some of the design information somewhere to tell
people how parrot works internally and why we've made the design
decisions that we have. Also, serious discussions of the internal
architecture are going to be necessary for people who are interesting
in writing NCI wrappers, extensions, dynpmcs, dynops, etc, and that's
a target audience that we are very much going to want to focus on for
the advent of Parrot 2.0.

Given that the information is useful to write out in book form,
whether that information belongs in this particular book or not is
another question entirely: The majority of this book is targeted at
end users, not core hackers. A better idea would probably be to start
drafting a separate "Parrot Internals" book, instead of cramming the
information into this "Parrot Users Guide" one we already have.

--Andrew Whitworth


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