2008Q4 Grant Proposal: Integrating Padre with Parrot and Rakudo

Category: Grants

Comments (5)


I've been watching Padre out of curiosity but with no intention of switching my editor (vi) since I'm so familiar with it. But I think targeting Perl6/Parrot is an excellent idea since it will allow integration on a level not really seen with an IDE and a dynamic language. Plus any work put into embedding Parrot into a real project like this will almost certainly be beneficial to Parrot on the whole and help other projects to embed it in the future.


This would be very very useful for making Perl 6 "real" for more people.


I don't understand Adam's comment. I don't see how a fledgling just-for-Perl editor targeting Perl 6 will convince anyone any further than the existing Perl 6 tech. Perl 6 modes for existing popular editors, which would actually Perl 6 and PIR tweaks into the tools that people already use seem more likely to draw people to pay attention -- but either way, I don't see a clear benefit to anyone here.


Let me address the main concern mentioned in both of my Padre related proposals.


Padre is NOT limited to editing Perl. While it is mainly targeting the Perl developers, it also provides features for other languages.


As a minimum Padre already provide syntax highlighting to all the major languages (we got this free by using Scintilla).


In addition Padre can be extended. Currently you can write plug-ins in Perl 5 but with the integration of Parrot you'll be able to use any language running on Parrot to write plug-ins.


As a proof-of-concept Padre 0.15 already includes a plug-in that is written in PIR runs on Parrot. If you have it configured.



One of the goals of perl 6 is to make the language be more tool friendly (method extraction, method/sub renaming, auto-completion/type ahead, argument hinting).

Building this will allow users and tool developers to provide feedback to the design team while the language is still evolving rapidly.


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