[Parrot-users] Starting to Use Parrot

Andrew Whitworth wknight8111 at gmail.com
Sun Nov 14 20:17:04 UTC 2010


On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 3:07 PM, adekoya adekunle
<adekunleadekoya at gmail.com> wrote:
> But another question...if I target parrot by generating a PIR from my
> code generator...that means for users of my compiler to be able to run
> the PIR code that would be invisibly generated by my code generator it
> means a Parrot VM must run on the user machine  ?   (1)

Yes. To use the functionality in libparrot, you would need to include
libparrot with your software, or the user would have to have it as a
prerequisite on their machines.

> If yes to above...then how do I package the parrot VM along with my
> compiler so that a end-user of my compiler that installs my compiler
> on his machine would automatically have parrot install as well ?  (2)

Depends on the platform. For windows, there exist binary installers (I
think?) to get Parrot installed. For linux, you can build from source
or download packages from various package installers. Some of the
packaged versions may be a little old, however. If you're on linux,
you can almost certainly build it from source without much effort.

> And when my compiler needs to invoke the parrot machine to execute the
> PIR code generated by my compiler...would i simply call parrot.exe
> like i do from the command line  ?   (3)

At the moment, the answer is "YES". You would need to pass the
generated code to parrot.exe. We are in the middle of creating a new
embedding API, and when that is ready you will be able to easily call
libparrot directly from your program.

> Does parrot support creating  GUI widgets  ?   (4)

What kind of GUI widgets? Parrot is just a VM, people can write GUI
applications on top of it with the right plugins, libraries, and
bindings. I have seen some bindings to get OpenGL and GTK applications
on Parrot. Others could easily be created too, by an interested
developer.

I would very much like to hear about what kinds of things you are
planning to do with Parrot. Do you use IRC? Developers hang out in
#parrot on irc.parrot.org if you want to chat.

--Andrew Whitworth


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