Parrot Grant Update for November and December
Fri, 04-Jan-2008 by
Dave Rolsky
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November and December saw the usual monthly release of Parrot. However, November's release was particularly notable, as it was version 0.5.0. The minor version number increase came because it includes an implementation of the object design as specified in PDD15. This was a major piece of work, both in the implementation, and integration with existing language implementaitons.
The 0.5.1 release was also quite exciting. The major work for this release was converting a number of language implementations to use the new Parrot Compiler Toolkit, which includes NQP, a simple subset of Perl 6. This means that Parrot's Perl 6 implementation is now largely written in NQP, which is important since the use of NQP opens up compiler development to anyone who can write in a Perl-like language, as opposed to anyone who can write C or Parrot assembler.
In November, Patrick Michaud received a joint grant from the Mozilla Foundation and The Perl Foundation of $15,000 to support his work on the Parrot Compiler Toolkit. The "original announcement":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2007/11/patrick_michaud_awarded_perl_6.html is on this blog and Patrick has been writing regular updates on his progress in "his use Perl journal":http://use.perl.org/journal.pl?op=list&uid=6013.
Another major milestone for Perl 6 on Parrot came at the end of December. It is now possible to produce a perl6 binary in the Parrot repository, which makes it much easier for people to run real Perl 6 code using Parrot.
A number of milestone payments were issued during this grant period. Kevin Tew and Jerry Gay split a payment for their work on the initial implementation of exceptions. Patrick Michaud received a payment for his implementation work on the AST Interface. Allison completed three milestones, the Concurrency Model (aka threads) design document (PDD25), initial implementation of events, and the design for Multimethod Dispatch (PDD27). As usual, Allison's payments will be set aside to help fund her Parrot work. The events implementation milestone payment will be split with chromatic.
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