Static Languages

[Jonathan Leto]

Howdy Jon,

This is a great question, that I talk about a bit in my recent talk
"Introduction to Parrot" [0,1,2]. I would say that Parrot is optimized
for dynamic languages, which have a lot more possibilities of things
changing at runtime, so while you could create a static language on
Parrot, it would not be very fast since Parrot doesn't know that you
don't want all the features of a dynamic language.

I definitely see that a niche exists for static language on Parrot,
but no one has really explored it. If you would like to spearhead
that, I am sure many people would be interested and grateful.

First person to write FORTRAN on Parrot gets mad props and a free beer from me.

Duke

[0] Video - http://ping.fm/7rGS5
[1] Slides - http://ping.fm/Qz4QO
[2] mp3 - http://ping.fm/B8WHy

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 1:33 PM, Jon Gentle <parrot at atrodo.org> wrote:
> 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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>
>



-- 
Jonathan "Duke" Leto
jonathan at leto.net
http://leto.net