Lably
Skip to content

Parrot virtual machine

Software to run programming languages

  • 6 min read
  • 5 chapters

Related on Lably

Through Virtual machine, Bytecode and Free and open-source software

Parrot was begun by the Perl community and developed with help from the open-source and free software communities. As a result, it was focused on license compatibility with Perl (Artistic License 2.0), platform compatibility across a broad array of systems, processor architecture compatibility across most modern processors, speed of execution, small size (around 700k depending on platform), and the flexibility to handle the varying demands made by Raku and other modern dynamic languages.

Version 1.0, with a stable application programming interface (API) for development, was released on March 17, 2009. The last version is release 8.1.0 "Andean Parakeet".

History

The name Parrot came from an April Fool's joke which announced a hypothetical language, named Parrot, that would unify Python and Perl. The name was later adopted by the Parrot project (initially a part of the Raku development effort) which aimed to support Raku, Python, and other programming languages.

The Parrot Foundation was dissolved in 2014. The Foundation was created in 2008 to hold the copyright and trademarks of the Parrot project, to help drive development of language implementations and the core codebase, to provide a base for growing the Parrot community, and to reach out to other language communities.

Historical design decisions are documented in the form of Parrot Design Documents, or PDDs, in the Parrot repository.

Until late 2005, Dan Sugalski was the lead designer and chief architect of Parrot. Chip Salzenberg, a longtime Perl, Linux kernel, and C++ hacker, took over until mid-2006, when he became the lead developer. Allison Randal, the lead developer of Punie and chief architect of Parrot's compiler tools, was the chief architect until mid-October 2010 when she stepped down and chose Christoph Otto as the new chief architect.

In August 2021, it was announced that Parrot virtual machine was no longer being actively developed. The post suggested that the role of Parrot as a virtual machine for Perl 6 has been filled by MoarVM.

Sign in to keep reading

4 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in Computing and communication

ISBNUnique numeric book identifier since 1970X (social network)American social networking serviceWayback MachineDigital archive by the Internet ArchivePython (programming language)General-purpose programming languageMacOSOperating system for Apple computersUnicodeCharacter encoding standard