Parrot 0.0.1 is Released

pudge on 2001-09-10T22:52:47

Simon writes "I suppose I ought to do something with this pumpkin. :) I've released version 0.0.1 of the Parrot interpreter. Get it from anonymous CVS or from its temporary location. (The version uploaded to CPAN had some, uh, problems.) The full release announcement follows."

Because the game of hide-and-seek was still going on, it took Edmund and Lucy some time to find the others. But when at last they were all together (which happened in the long room, where the suit of armour was) Lucy burst out:

"Peter! Susan! It's all true. Edmund has seen it too. There is a country you can get to through the wardrobe. Edmund and I both got in. We met one another in there, in the wood. Go on, Edmund; tell them all about it."

- "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe",
CS Lewis
I suppose (unlike Edmund did) I should tell you all about it. What we're releasing today is a very, very early alpha of the Parrot interpreter. At the moment, we have support for some simple operations on integer, floating point and string registers, and the ability to read in and execute bytecode. We also have an assembler which can generate bytecode output from Parrot assembly.

You can get the source tarball in (currently) two different ways:

Once you've unpacked parrot, you should be able to "make test_prog", and use the Parrot assembler to turn assembly into bytecode: make test_prog perl assemble.pl test.pasm > test.pbc ./test_prog test.pbc perl assemble.pl test2.pasm > test2.pbc ./test_prog test2.pbc

The first test program will add some numbers together, count to 10,000,000, and tell you how long it took; the second test program will print a familiar greeting.

In the next email, coming in a couple of minutes, I'll outline two areas where I really, really need some patches before we go much further; you should also note that Parrot has a bug/request tracking system at http://parrotbugs.develooper.com/ which will be filled with some more things that I'd like people to take a look at.

Patches should be sent to the perl6-internals mailing list, where I'll take a look at them and apply them to the CVS tree. As time goes by, people who regularly submit good patches will be given committer access to the tree, and can help me out applying other patches from the list.

IMPORTANT! Please note that we haven't decided the final license for Parrot yet. You currently receive Parrot under the same terms as Perl 5: your choice of either the Artistic or General Public Licenses.

Have fun,
Simon
-- set_s_sc S1, "Just Another Parrot Hacker, " print_s S1


Uh... Problems :)

chromatic on 2001-09-11T05:49:05

If you download the CPAN version, either get make_op_header.pl from CVS or write your own.

With that, it compiles and runs on my Linux box.

Re:Uh... Problems :)

ask on 2001-09-11T07:03:02

eh, Simon just wrote that the version on CPAN doesn't work. Get it from CVS (http://cvs.perl.org/) (as you did) or from http://www.netthink.co.uk/downloads/parrot-0.0.1.t ar.gz (as Simon just suggested).

  - ask

 

Re:Uh... Problems :)

chromatic on 2001-09-11T17:27:54

I'm stubborn, and I don't read or follow directions. Surely there are a few other Perl hackers with similar characteristics. :)

Re:Uh... Problems :)

pudge on 2001-09-12T14:31:27

No, you're the only one. :)