Allison Randal gave an overview of the Parrot Virtual Machine, plus delved into the syntactic details of the PIR assembly language for the virtual machine. (around 1200 opcodes.)
Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.
She’s the chief architect for the Parrot project, and is also the author of the Python port to Parrot, Pynie. Apparently the Python maintainers are happy to have help with language backend support.
Allison said that perhaps 50 dynamic languages are in some process of being ported to Parrot. Often they run up to 10x faster on Parrot than the original implementation.
One member said he knew of a commercial project that used Parrot as the language VM when the underlying chip or OS became obsolete and they needed to port to a more modern system.
PIR source is actually run through flex and yacc.
This was her third talk on Parrot in the Bay Area recently. They’re organized around her business meetings for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, to be held in July in San Jose.
Besides working for O’Reilly Media, she is also working on her Ph.D. computer science at Bristol University in the UK.
Thanks again to Symantec for hosting SVLUG meetings.