The Parrot Bytecode Interpreter
Parrot is a common bytecode format and interpreter for dynamic languages; it is designed to run Perl 6 code efficiently, but is intended to be language-agnostic.
Documentation
The Parrot documentation is spread across the following files:
- intro.pod
-
An introductory article on what Parrot is and how to do some interesting things with it.
- overview.pod
-
An overview of the Parrot architecture and design.
- running.pod
-
Brief descriptions of the different executables constructed and how to run them.
- faq.pod
-
The Parrot FAQ.
- core_ops.pod
-
A description of the core operations in the Parrot assembly language.
- parrot_assembly.pod
-
The master list of Parrot assembly operations; not all of these have been implemented, so you should stick to core_ops when writing your assembly programs.
- io_ops.pod
-
A description of the operations used in Parrot's IO subsystem.
- vtables.pod
-
Describes what PMCs are and how they work.
- embed.pod
-
Describes the embedding subsystem in excruciating detail.
- jit.pod
-
A brief description of Parrot's Just-In-Time compiler.
- parrotbyte.pod
-
The Parrot bytecode format.
- packfile-perl.pod, packfile-c.pod
-
The APIs for accessing packed bytecode files (packfiles) from Perl and C.
- strings.pod
-
A description of the string implementation.
- tests.pod
-
Hints on writing tests for the Parrot interpreter.
Supported Platforms
Parrot compiles and runs on a large number of platforms, including all common ones. The Parrot team is committed to supporting the following combinations as "core platforms": Linux (x86), CygWin, Win32, Tru64, OpenVMS (Alpha), Solaris (Sparc), FreeBSD (x86).
Authors
Parrot is developed and maintained by the members of the perl6-internals@perl.org
mailing list.
Dan Sugalski (
dan@sidhe.org
) is the chief architect.Simon Cozens (
simon@netthink.co.uk
) was the release manager for releases 0.0.1 through 0.0.4.Jeff Goff (
drforr@hargray.com
) is the current release manager.
Web pages
See
http://dev.perl.org/
http://cvs.perl.org/
http://www.parrotcode.org/
for more information.