Parrot Debugger Language of Choice

Kevin Polulak kpolulak at gmail.com
Sat Apr 30 03:33:15 UTC 2011


So I thought I was all set for GSoC. I was going to use nqp-rx, maybe a
little C but now after carefully weighing the advantages and disadvantages,
I'm very undecided. Here's the score:

*C*

*Advantages*

   - Fast
   - Familiar language for me

*Disadvantages*

   - IMHO, Parrot C code is a little ugly (i.e. mixed case and underscores
   :-C~ )

*
NQP*

*Advantages*

   - I'm very comfortable with Perl 5
   - Inline PIR could prove useful
   - Support for regular expressions
   - Can use Rosella library

*Disadvantages*

   - Unfamiliar to me (but with Perl background, learning hasn't been too
   hard)
   - Poorly documented
   - Still a little quirky


*Winxed
*
*Advantages*

   - Fast
   - Can use Rosella library
   - Not included with Parrot

*Disadvantages*

   - Not crazy about JS-like syntax
   - Unfamiliar to me
   - Poorly documented


My mentor, cotto, suggests Winxed. I initially never considered Winxed
because I did not like the JS-like syntax. Trying to keep an open mind and
looking around at some Winxed source code, I'm starting to come around to it
a little more and see why nearly everybody always has something good to say
about it. One of the biggest disadvantages of using it, however, is that
Winxed is not packaged with Parrot by default meaning that anyone wishing to
build the debugger would need Winxed installed. I really want to avoid
dependencies. However, dukeleto suggested a neat solution: include the
PIR-generated code with Parrot.

What do you guys think?
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