Parrot reaches IO PDD Milestone

virtual machine for scripting languages

The 0.4.8 release of Parrot marked the completion of a design milestone: the IO PDD [Parrot Design Document]. This is a major accomplishment, as the design work on IO impacts much of Parrot's design, including areas such as concurrency and networking. This work was completed by Allison with help and review by Jerry Gay.

The next area Allison will be focusing on is the object design, which is necessary in order for implementation work to begin on IO.

On December 16 and January 13, the Parrot development team held "Parrot Bug Days" to stimulate interest in Parrot and provide a way for newcomers to work on the project, with guidance from experienced Parrot developers. These have been a great success, fixing many outstanding bugs, and the team plans to continue doing this on a monthly basis.

Jerry Gay, working as release manager, released Parrot 0.4.8 on January 16th. Besides the IO PDD, this release includes significant work on the parser/compiler tool chain, and greatly improved support for various Perl 6 features, including hashes, arrays, method calls, and more. Patrick Michaud has led the work on the compiler and Perl 6 implementation.

In 0.4.8, the Tcl implementation (ParTcl) now passes almost 25% of the cvs Tcl test suite, thanks in large part to work by Will Coleda and Matt Diephouse.

During this grant period, $1,000 was disbursed to Jerry Gay for his work on the IO PDD.

Dave Rolsky
Parrot Grant Manager
The Perl Foundation