The Parrot is dead. Long live the Parrot?

[Fields, Christopher J]

On Feb 10, 2013, at 11:16 AM, Reini Urban <rurban at x-ray.at>
 wrote:

> ...
> And really, does anyone really believe that the jvm is a realistic perl6 vm?
> It's good like jruby, for server or long-running apps. But you cannot
> improve startup time.
> And you mess with Oracle.

I'll say this, watching as (an almost complete) outsider.  There is a *LOT* of code in my field (computational biology) that is written for JVM.  Just the possibility of being able to tap into such code from perl6 via jvm is very enticing.

So, yes jvm is bloated and possibly horrendous and you have to mess with Oracle, but there are serious upsides for some of us.  It's ready now, has decent support, and possibly offers the opportunity to flesh out bits of the perl6 spec that need to be addressed.  Maybe a perl6 on jvm won't be fast, but it will be available on a vm that has community support.  And, maybe identifying some of the problems with a perl 6 on jvm will help re-stimulate parrot-lite/parrot2 and will push you to do more for p2.

Also, as was mentioned on IRC a few times by others, I really hope the personal stuff will be set aside on *all* sides.  It's very unappetizing/demoralizing for some of us on the outside still interested in perl6 and/or parrot.  Though I tend to agree w/ chromatic on who is the expert in this debate, this last exchange doesn't really entice me into trying p2 out, even if it can actually produce unicorns and pixie dust.

To end on a more positive note: rurban, I really hope p2 works out, sounds very promising.

chris