m0llusk's Journal: parrot development involves much honing

Parrot (http://parrotcode.org) is a virtual machine intended to support Perl 6 and a wide range of other languages. Recently version 0.5.0 was released with the object model solidly laid out. Watching Parrot come together and experimenting with recent releases has been tremendous fun for me, honestly one of the highlights of my life as a geek.

In a recent Slashdot thread Parrot came up and was derided. It is easy to see how that happens since there has been much work put into it and yet the results remain very much incomplete. One poster asserted that .NET does everything in that space already and has great Visual Studio support. To me that was telling because Parrot is about constructing an excellent tool set and matching runtime with the most honed, appealing, and useful features possible.

There will always be plenty of argument about how good the results are, but the effort going into Parrot is far beyond smooth Visual Studio integration and even .NET itself. The .NET environment has limitations and quirks that are not always positive, some of which come from its roots as a Microsoft product platform. Parrot will be complete in due time and Visual Studio integration is all but certain. By all means wait for more progress, but when you can, do look at Parrot and compare and you may be impressed.