Future Directions for Parrot and Rakudo
Brian Gernhardt
benji at silverinsanity.com
Fri Jun 21 18:03:35 UTC 2013
On Jun 21, 2013, at 1:07 PM, "Jonathan \"Duke\" Leto" <jonathan at leto.net> wrote:
> As soon as Rakudo Perl 6 works on MoarVM (the spiritual successor of
> the m0 branch in parrot.git) [0], anything that Rakudo depends on that
> is not deemed necessary by Parrot core developers will be removed.
"Not deemed necessary"? Necessary to what? There are plenty of things in Parrot not really being used that stripping out the bits that are seems somewhat counter-productive.
I would agree Parrot could use change. Strip things down, don't be afraid to break things.
If I had the time, I'd make a branch killing PIR and replacing it with a dumb assembly language and a bytecode generator a la ASM. But I'd do that in parallel with Winxed and NQP branches that taught them the new system. Building a system that nothing uses is interesting only from an academic standpoint (and I say that as an academic ;-).
But I'd also want to do things like try to kill PMCs and rebuild them as 6model objects. Pull _more_ from NQP, not strip things out from under it. It's by far the most active thing on Parrot, and honestly I think points out a lot of the utility of the system. The fact that the system is extensible enough to build something completely different is interesting.
Heck, if MoarVM is a successor to M0, can we build Parrot on top of it? I was never quite sure what would happen after an M0 interpreter was running, but maybe it would be interesting to try.
Really, I guess my point is "we're removing things we don't need even if you're using them" is a very combative statement. Especially when it's not clear what we actually need. I'd say:
1) Don't be afraid to break things
2) Build interesting things
but also
3) Talk about building first, instead of breaking first
4) Fix things we broke if we can
~~ benabik
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