Questions we ought to be able to answer

James E Keenan jkeen at verizon.net
Sat Jul 16 20:35:52 UTC 2011


I'm preparing to give a talk on Parrot at FOSSCON in Philadelphia next 
Saturday.  This preparation makes me realize how much I don't understand 
about Parrot.  More specifically, how many questions I can't give 
concise answers to.  And, as I suggested in my YAPC talk, I suspect I'm 
not alone.

So here are some questions I'd like to be able to answer.  They are not 
necessarily important questions.  Their order is simply that in which 
they came into mind.  You will probably have better questions for which 
you need answers; feel free to ask them.

1. Who first came up with the idea of Parrot as a register-based VM? 
Was there extensive discussion at that time of the merits of register 
machines vs. stack machines?

[On #IRC, allison attributed this to Simon Cozens and Dan Sugalski.  Can 
anyone provide more detail?]

2. Describe in one sentence the purpose of Winxed.

3. A Winxed snapshot has recently been included in the Parrot 
distribution for the first time, and a winxed object is now linked to 
the parrot executable during compilation.  In one sentence, answer: 
What is the criterion for determining why "external" software such as 
Winxed is included in Parrot in that way?

4. Describe in one sentence the purpose of NQP.  Describe in another 
sentence the current status of the various flavors of NQP (nqp, nqp-rx, 
etc.).

5. Is this an accurate and complete description of the type of files 
which the 'parrot' executable can process?
   .pir
   .pasm
   .pbc

6. Do we have a program which clearly demonstrates the concept of 
interoperability of high-level languages implemented in Parrot?



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