Static Languages

[Jon Gentle]

Hello,

I have been wondering for a few months now, how useful/appropriate is parrot
for static languages?  If it's not, has there ever been any discussion about
a companion vm project? One that would not only be similar in design and
philosophy, but would integrate with parrot and enable static and dynamic
languages to coexist.

The reason that I ask, is because some years ago, I worked on my own little
project called draak.  It was aimed at being a compiler that didn't
understand a particular language, but at runtime would load and parse a
language's lex and parser from a text file and then compile it.  I was able
to get all of that to work fairly well, but I never had a good intermediate
representation, instead I just used x86 asm as the output.  In recent years,
I have gone back and forth on how to do a good IR, between using parrot,
something like llvm, and rolling my own, but I could never get enough worked
through to make a decision.  My question above is spawned from liking the
concept and implementation that has been done so far with parrot, but never
sure if parrot would be good for static languages.  While I was thinking
through that, I had some musing that if parrot didn't fit the bill, could
parrot have a companion project that would focus on static languages.  That
would allow an entire dynamic/static language ecosystem to exist.

I apologize if the question has been asked, discussed and answered before.
My google-fu is not as strong as it once was.

-Jon Gentle
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