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The Parrot Primer

Welcome to Parrot

This is an update to the article 'Parrot: Some Assembly Required' which appeared on http://www.perl.com for the 0.0.2 release of Parrot. It's intended as being the best way for the newcomer to Parrot to learn what Parrot is and how to use it.

What is Parrot?

First, though, what is Parrot, and why are we making such a fuss about it? Well, if you haven't been living in a box for the past year, you'll know that the Perl community has embarked on the design and implementation of a new version of Perl, both the language and the interpreter.

Parrot is strongly related to Perl 6, but it is not Perl 6. To find out what it actually is, we need to know a little about how Perl works. When you feed your program into perl, it is first compiled into an internal representation, or bytecode; then this bytecode is fed to almost separate subsystem inside perl to be interpreted. So there are two distinct phases of perl's operation - compilation to bytecode, and interpretation of bytecode. This is not unique to Perl; other languages following this design include Python, Ruby, Tcl and, believe it or not, even Java.

In previous versions of Perl, this arrangement has been pretty ad hoc: there hasn't been any overarching design to the interpreter or the compiler, and the interpreter has ended up being pretty reliant on certain features of the compiler. Nevertheless, the interpreter (some languages call it a Virtual Machine) can be thought of as a software CPU - the compiler produces "machine code" instructions for the virtual machine, which it then executes, much like a C compiler produces machine code to be run on a real CPU.

Perl 6 plans to separate out the design of the compiler and the interpreter. This is why we've come up with a subproject, which we've called Parrot, which has a certain, limited amount of independence from Perl 6. Parrot is destined to be the Perl 6 Virtual Machine, the software CPU on which we will run Perl 6 bytecode. We're working on Parrot before we work on the Perl 6 compiler because it's much easier to write a compiler once you've got a target to compile to!

The name "Parrot" was chosen after the 2001 April Fool's Joke which had Perl and Python collaborating on the next version of their interpreters. This is meant to reflect the idea that we'd eventually like other languages to use Parrot as their VM; in a sense, we'd like Parrot to become a "common language runtime" for dynamic languages.

Where we're at

It should be stressed we're still in the early stages of development.

But don't let that put you off! Parrot is still very much usable; we've already seen two mini-languages emerge which compile down to Parrot bytecode (more on that later), and Leon Brocard has been working on automatically converting Java bytecode to Parrot.

At the moment, it's possible to write simple programs in Parrot assembly language, use an assembler to convert them to machine code and then execute them on a test interpreter. We have support for a wide variety of ordinary and transcendental mathematical operations, some rudimentary string support, and some conditional operators.

How to get it

So let's get ourselves a copy of Parrot, so that we can start investigating how to program in the Parrot assembler.

Periodic, numbered releases will appear on CPAN (we're currently on version 0.0.3), but at this stage of the project an awful lot is changing between releases. To really keep up to date with Parrot, we should get our copy from the CVS repository. Here's how we do that:

% cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.perl.org:/cvs/public login
(Logging in to anonymous@cvs.perl.org)
CVS password: [ and here we just press return ]
% cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.perl.org:/cvs/public co parrot
cvs server: Updating parrot
U parrot/.cvsignore
U parrot/Config_pm.in
....

There's also a web interface to the CVS repository, available at http://cvs.perl.org/cvsweb/parrot/.

For those of you who can't use CVS, there are CVS snapshots built every six hours which you can find at http://cvs.perl.org/snapshots/parrot/.

Now we have downloaded Parrot, we need to build it; so:

% cd parrot
% perl Configure.pl
Parrot Configure
Copyright (C) 2001 Yet Another Society

Since you're running this script, you obviously have
Perl 5--I'll be pulling some defaults from its configuration.
...

You'll then be asked a series of questions about your local configuration; you can almost always hit return for each one. Finally, you'll be told to type make; with any luck, Parrot will successfully build the test interpreter. (If it doesn't, the address to complain to is at the end of this introduction...)

The test suite

Now we should run some tests; so type make test and you should see a readout like the following:

perl t/harness
t/op/basic.....ok, 1/2 skipped:  label constants unimplemented in
assembler
t/op/string....ok, 1/4 skipped:  I'm unable to write it!
All tests successful, 2 subtests skipped.
Files=2, Tests=6,  2 wallclock secs ( 1.19 cusr +  0.22 csys =  1.41 CPU)

(Of course, there are many more tests than this, but you get the idea; tests may be skipped - for one reason or another - but none of them should fail!)

Parrot Concepts

Before we dive into programming Parrot assembly, let's take a brief look at some of the concepts involved.

Types

The Parrot CPU has four basic data types:

INTVAL

An integer type; guaranteed to be wide enough to hold a pointer.

FLOATVAL

An architecture-independent floating point type.

STRING

An abstracted, encoding-independent string type.

PMC

A scalar.

The first three types are pretty much self-explanatory; the final type, Parrot Magic Cookies, are slightly more difficult to understand. But that's OK, because they're not actually implemented yet! We'll talk more about PMCs at the end of the article.

Registers

The current Perl 5 virtual machine is a stack machine - it communicates values between operations by keeping them on a stack. Operations load values onto the stack, do whatever they need to do, and put the result back onto the stack. This is very easy to work with, but it's very slow: to add two numbers together, you need to perform three stack pushes and two stack pops. Worse, the stack has to grow at runtime, and that means allocating memory just when you don't want to be allocating it.

So Parrot's going to break with the established tradition for virtual machines, and use a register architecture, more akin to the architecture of a real hardware CPU. This has another advantage: we can use all the existing literature on how to write compilers and optimizers for register-based CPUs for our software CPU!

Parrot has specialist registers for each type: 32 INTVAL registers, 32 FLOATVAL registers, 32 string registers and 32 PMC registers. In Parrot assembler, these are named I0...I31, N0...N31, S0...S31, P0...P31.

Now let's look at some assembler. We can set these registers with the set operator:

set I1, 10
set N1, 3.1415
set S1, "Hello, Parrot"

All Parrot ops have the same format: the name of the operator, the destination register, and then the operands.

Operations

There are a variety of operations you can perform: the file docs/core_ops.pod documents them, along with a little more about the assembler syntax. For instance, we can print out the contents of a register, or a constant:

print "The contents of register I1 is: "
print I1
print "\n"

Or we can perform mathematical functions on registers:

add I1, I1, I2  # Add the contents of I2 to the contents of I1
mul I3, I2, I4  # Multiply I2 by I4 and store in I3
inc I1          # Increment I1 by one
dec N3, 1.5     # Decrement N3 by 1.5

We can even perform some simple string manipulation:

set S1, "fish"
set S2, "bone"
concat S1, S2       # S1 is now "fishbone"
set S3, "w"
substr S4, S1, 1, 7
concat S3, S4       # S3 is now "wishbone"
length I1, S3       # I1 is now 8

Branches

Code gets a little boring without flow control; for starters, Parrot knows about branching and labels. The branch op is equivalent to Perl's goto:

         branch TERRY
JOHN:    print "fjords\n"
         branch END
MICHAEL: print " pining"
         branch GRAHAM
TERRY:   print "It's"
         branch MICHAEL
GRAHAM:  print " for the "
         branch JOHN
END:     end

It can also do simple tests for whether or not a register contains a true value:

         set I1, 12
         set I2, 5
         mod I3, I1, I2
         if I3, REMAIND
         print "5 is an integer divisor of 12"
         branch DONE
REMAIND: print "5 divides 12 with remainder "
         print I3
DONE:    print "\n"
         end

Note that if branches to REMAIND if I3 contains a true (i.e. non-zero) value; if I3 is zero, execution falls through to the next statement. Here's what that would look like in Perl, for comparison:

$i1 = 12;
$i2 = 5;
$i3 = $i1 % $i2;
if ($i3) {
  print "5 divides 12 with remainder ";
  print $i3;
} else {
  print "5 is an integer divisor of 12";
}
print "\n";
exit;

And speaking of comparison, we have the full range of numeric comparators: eq, ne, lt, gt, le and ge. Note that you can't use these operators on arguments of disparate types; you may even need to add the suffix _i or _n to the op to tell it what type of argument you are using - although the assembler ought to divine this for you, by the time you read this.

Some Parrot Programs

Now let's have a look at a few simple Parrot programs to give you a feel for the language.

Displaying the Time

This little program displays the Unix epoch time every second: (or so)

        set I3, 3000000
REDO:   time I1
        print I1
        print "\n"
        set I2 0
SPIN:   inc I2
        le I2, I3, SPIN
        branch REDO
        end

First, we set integer register 3 to contain 3 million - that's a completely arbitrary number, due to the fact that Parrot averages a massive six million ops per second on my machine. Then the program consists of two loops: the outer loop stores the current Unix time in integer register 1, prints it out, prints a new line, and resets register 2 to zero. The inner loop increments register 2 until it reaches the 3 million we stored in register 3. When it is no longer less than (or equal to) 3 million, we go back to the REDO of the outer loop. In essence, we're just spinning around a busy loop to waste some time. This is only because Parrot doesn't currently have a "sleep" op; we'll see how to implement one later on.

How do we run this? First, we need to assemble this into Parrot bytecode, with the assemble.pl provided. So, copy the assembler to a file showtime.pasm, and inside your Parrot directory, run:

perl assemble.pl showtime.pasm > showtime.pbc

(.pbc is the file extension for Parrot bytecode.)

Finding a Fibonacci number

The Fibonacci series is defined like this: take two numbers, 1 and 1. Then repeatedly add together the last two numbers in the series to make the next one: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. The Fibonacci number fib(n) is the n'th number in the series. Here's a simple Parrot assembler program which finds the first 20 Fibonacci numbers:

# Some simple code to print some Fibonacci numbers
# Leon Brocard <acme@astray.com>

        print   "The first 20 fibonacci numbers are:\n"
        set     I1, 0
        set     I2, 20
        set     I3, 0
        set     I4, 1
REDO:   set     I5, I4
        add     I4, I3, I4
        set     I3, I5
        print   I3
        print   "\n"
        inc     I1
        lt      I1, I2, REDO
DONE:   end

This is the equivalent code in Perl:

print "The first 20 fibonacci numbers are:\n";
my $i = 0;
my $target = 20;
my $a = 0;
my $b = 1;
until ($i == $target) {
   my $num = $b;
   $b += $a;
   $a = $num;
   print $a,"\n";
   $i++;
}

Further examples

Additional examples of what can be done with Parrot assembler can be found in the parrot/examples/assembly subdirectory, and on the web at http://www.parrotcode.org/examples/.

Jako

So much for programming in assembler; let's move on and look at a medium-level language - Jako. Jako was written by Gregor Purdy who obviously got sick (as a parrot) of programming in assembler. Jako looks a little bit like C and a little bit like Perl, and it can do anything you can do in Parrot assembler, but a little tidier. Let's try that Fibonacci program again:

print("The first 20 fibonacci numbers are:\n");
var int i = 0;
var int target = 20;
var int a = 0;
var int b = 1;
var int num;
while (i != target) {
   num = b;
   b += a;
   a = num;
   print("$a\n");
   i++;
}

Notice how similar this is to the Perl version? I stripped away the $ sigils, replaced the Perlish until with a more common while, replaced my with var int and I was nearly done.

The Jako compiler, jakoc, ships with Parrot in the languages/jako subdirectory:

 % languages/jako/jakoc fib.jako > fib.pasm
 % perl assemble.pl fib.pasm > fib.pbc
 % ./parrot fib.pbc
The first 20 fibonacci numbers are:
1
1
2
3
...

Where Next?

Parrot is obviously developing very rapidly, and we've still got a long way to go before we are ready to a compiler to this platform. This section is for those who are interested in helping us take Parrot further.

Adding operations

The first thing we need is a lot more operations; but this needs to be carefully thought out, and all new proposals for operations should be checked by Dan Sugalski, the Parrot designer.

That said, adding operations to Parrot is actually very simple. Let's add the sleep operator we were complaining about earlier.

Although we've been able to say print "String" and print I3 to print a register, Parrots ops are not polymorphic - this is some trickery carried out by the assembler. Those two operations would be implemented by two different ops, print_sc to print a string constant, and print_i to print an integer register. All this is handled by the preprocessor, so all we need to do to add an opcode is to add its implementation to the core.ops file.

The format of this file is a little funny; it's C which is pre-processed by a Perl program. The C functions should be declared either op foo () or inline op foo ().

The inline prefix is a hint for code generation that this is a very simple op function, which for JIT or other optimizations might be able to be converted inline. Non-inline op functions might require more work.

There are special patterns, the most important of which is goto NEXT(). The statement goto NEXT() means that the address of the next op should be worked out automatically during real C code generation based on the size of the current op.

Arguments are denoted by $1, $2 and so on - they aren't actual arguments to the C function, but are pulled out of the bytecode stream.

So let's do the constant sleep op first. We want to take the first parameter, $1, and pass it to sleep:

inline op sleep (i|ic) {
  sleep($1);
  goto NEXT();
}

That works for both integer constant and integer register argument versions of the op function.

All that's missing is a test suite (see t/op/basic.t for an example) and some documentation (add your POD to core.ops and it'll be automatically added into the appropriate file in docs) and we've added our instructions to the Parrot CPU. The assembler will automatically determine whether we're sleeping for a constant time or a variable time, and will despatch the right op when we just say sleep. Now we can rewrite the showtime code a little more neatly - or rather, you can, as a nice little exercise!

Vtable datatypes

Parrot has recently added some basic support for PMCs. PMCs are almost like Perl 5's SVs and Python's Objects, only more so. A PMC is an object of some type, which can be instructed to perform various operations. So when we say

inc P1

to increment the value in PMC register 1, the increment method is called on the PMC - and it's up to the PMC how it handles that method.

PMCs are how we plan to make Parrot language-independent - a Perl PMC would have different behavior from a Python PMC or a Tcl PMC. The individual methods are function pointers held in a structure called a vtable, and each PMC has a pointer to the vtable which implements the methods of its "class". Hence a Perl interpreter would link in a library full of Perl-like classes and its PMCs would have Perl-like behaviour.

The PMC types available are described in doc/vtables.pod; you can create a new PMC with

new P0, <typename>

and then use any of the instructions in core.ops which support PMCs. doc/vtables.pod also tells you how to implement your own PMC vtable classes.

More Todos

There are a huge number of things we want to do with Parrot: we need, for instance, to create some I/O operators to make programs actually interesting; we want to create a range of string functions to deal with various encodings and convert between them; we want more documentation; we really, really need more tests; we want to check Parrot's portability to various platforms; and finally, there are a load more ops that we need to implement.

Getting involved

We've got a good number of people working away on Parrot, but we could always use a few more. To help out, you'll need a subscription to the perl6-internals mailing list, (perl6-internals@perl.org), where all the development takes place. You should also keep up to date with the CVS version of Parrot; if you want to be alerted to CVS commits, you can subscribe to the cvs-parrot mailing list (cvs-parrot@perl.org). CVS commit access is given to those who taken responsibility for a particular area of Parrot, or who often commit high-quality patches.

A useful web page is http://cvs.perl.org, which reminds you how to use CVS, and allows you to browse the CVS repository; the code page is a summary of this information and other resources about Parrot. Another good resource is http://www.parrotcode.org.

So don't delay - pick up a Parrot today!