Status November 2005

virtual machine for scripting languages

The NLnet contribution to the Perl Foundation is used to support two developers: Chip Salzenberg and Leopold Tötsch. Both work on different areas of Parrot.

Chip Salzenberg

Chip is working on milestone 1: the design document milestone. The deliverables for this milestone are the Parrot design documents (PDDs).

In this period, Chip has completed the overall roadmap for the design documents (PDD 0), the lexical variables design document (PDD 20), and the calling conventions design document (PDD 3). In addition, Chip is responsible for ongoing design decisions on the mailing lists and over IRC, and architectural and code review on major contributions to Parrot.

Leopold Tötsch

Leo is working on milestone 2: the stub implementation milestone. Leo's responsibilities also include ongoing bug fixes and implementation of new features for Parrot.

He released Parrot 0.3.0 on October 1st. The most significant feature of this release is the implementation of the new calling conventions.

He released Parrot 0.3.1 on November 6th. The most significant feature of this release is the completion of variable-sized register frames. This feature represents months of work by Leo and is an important step forward in flexibility and stability for Parrot. Among other things, moving to variable-sized register frames fixed a significant long-term bug in Parrot with continuation-based control flow. (See Leo's journal for details.)

Leo plans to release Parrot 0.4.0 over the Dec 3rd-4th weekend. For this release he implemented lexical handling according to PDD20, and updated the Parrot tests for the new lexical handling. He also helped the developers of the TCL and Amber compilers on Parrot to use the new lexical syntax (both are working fine with it). Also included in this release will be his implementation of argument passing to exception handlers (TCL already works with it).

Leo has submitted a proposal for a Parrot talk to SANE 2006.