Parrot Project Status

virtual machine for scripting languages

May and June [2007] saw the usual monthly releases of Parrot, 0.4.12 and 0.4.13. Between these two releases, there were numerous language updates, including PHP and Lisp. On the Perl 6 front, 0.4.13 was the first release where Parrot passed the Perl 6 sanity tests. This is an exciting achievement, because it means that Parrot supports enough of Perl 6 that the developers can start using Perl 6 to bootstrap its own implementation.

More recently, Parrot 0.4.15 "Augean Stable" got released, where lots of code review was made, many bugs were fixed, some languages added (NQP, a very lightweight Perl 6-like language), significant improvements and refactors to the PCT (Parrot Compiler Toolkit) included, and necessary documentation updates.
There were also many improvements to the Parrot internals, notably on the object implementation, as well as smaller improvements in the garbage collector, memory leak fixing, and general cleanup. The object work focused on implementing the new object metamodel documented in PDD15 and switching current object code to this new metamodel.

On the design side, there was significant work on the design for PMCs (PDD17).

Parrot had a strong presence at the recent YAPC::NA conference in Houston, TX. There was almost a full day of talks devoted to Parrot, including presentations by chromatic, project manager Will Coleda, Patrick Michaud, and Parrot architect Allison Randal.