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Concept
Parrot virtual machine
Summary
Parrot was a register-based process virtual machine designed to run dynamic languages efficiently. It is possible to compile Parrot assembly language and Parrot intermediate representation (PIR, an intermediate language) to Parrot bytecode and execute it. Parrot is free and open-source software.
Parrot was started by the Perl community and is developed with help from the open-source and free software communities. As a result, it is focused on license compatibility with Perl (Artistic License 2.0), platform compatibility across a broad array of systems, processor architecture compatibility across most modern processors, speed of execution, small size (around 700k depending on platform), and the flexibility to handle the varying demands made by Raku and other modern dynamic languages.
Version 1.0, with a stable application programming interface (API) for development, was released on March 17, 2009. The last version is release 8.1.0 "Andean Parakeet". Parrot was officially discontinued in August 2021, after being supplanted by MoarVM in its main use (Raku) and never becoming a mainstream VM for any of its other supported languages.
The name Parrot came from an April Fool's joke which announced a hypothetical language, named Parrot, that would unify Python and Perl. The name was later adopted by this project (initially a part of the Raku development effort) which aims to support Raku, Python, and other programming languages. Several languages are being ported to run on the Parrot virtual machine.
The Parrot Foundation was dissolved in 2014. The Foundation was created in 2008 to hold the copyright and trademarks of the Parrot project, to help drive development of language implementations and the core codebase, to provide a base for growing the Parrot community, and to reach out to other language communities.
The goal of the Parrot virtual machine is to host client languages and allow inter-operation between them. Several hurdles exist in accomplishing this goal, in particular the difficulty of mapping high-level concepts, data, and data structures between languages.
Official source
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