Project Status Update

virtual machine for scripting languages

The Parrot team has continued to make monthly releases, releasing 0.4.16 in September and 0.4.17 in October [2007]. These releases include more work on the NQP (Not Quite Perl) language as well as many updates and cleanups for the design documents (PDDs).

As usual, there were also plenty of bug fixes, and in particular much of the code was reviewed as part of the effort to complete the PMC (Parrot Magic Cookie) design.

I'm very happy to report that the Parrot team has met the milestones in the new, much more aggressive schedule laid out by Allison , and is on track to meet the coming November 1st milestones as well.

Allison has completed the Events design document (PDD24). Patrick Michaud has completed the design for the AST Interface (PDD26) and is working on its implementation, aiming to be done at the beginning of November.

In October, Allison spoke on Parrot at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop and led a Parrot hackathon at there as well.

Kevin Farnham, a developer who writes for the O'Reilly Network, wrote a blog post about using Parrot with libraries build with Intel's Threaded Building Blocks (the article).

Paul Cochrane, one of the Parrot developers, did some analysis of commit and release frequency for Parrot since its inception. The trend of this data shows an increasing level of activity over the lifetime of the project, which is a good indicator of the project's health.

It's also important to note that there is sharp change in the number of commits right at the time of the first payment from this grant (April of 2005). This is strong evidence that the grant is serving its intended purpose of drawing in new developers and generally increasing interest and activity in Parrot. The graph and statistics can be found on the front page of the Parrot wiki.

In this past grant period, a $2,000 payment was issued to Patrick Michaud for completing the AST Interface design. Additionally, $2,000 of grant money has been set aside to fund travel and other related expenses for Allison. She will use this money to travel to hackathons and Perl conferences as part of her Parrot development work.

Dave Rolsky
Parrot Grant Manager
Perl Foundation