Parrot Project Proliferation Part 3

This is part 3 of my series on the cool new Parrot projects that are popping up around the interwebs. Today I'm going to introduce Markdown, NQP-RX, and nqpTAP.

Markdown

Markdown is a text markup syntax that's designed to be easy to read and edit. In some ways, it's like wikitext, except Markdown has been driven by a consistent design philosophy while wikitext has grown in a platform-dependent ad hoc way.

Parrot has it's own markdown engine now, courtesy of fperrad. It converts markdown input into properly-formatted valid HTML output. And the best part is that it runs on pure Parrot. So now, with all your cool websites you're making with mod_parrot, you can use this markdown engine to format text.

NQP-RX

It's not exactly a small project, but NQP-RX really deserves some attention. It's a rewrite of NQP and PGE from the Parrot repo, but properly integrating the grammars into the NQP language and enabling a lot of cool new features that "classic" NQP doesn't have. On top of that, NQP-RX properly bootstraps: It knows enough syntax in order to parse itself (after it's already been built from PIR source, of course). That's no small feat for a program written in the Parrot equivalent of assembly language.

The old NQP is still hanging around in the Parrot repo like it always has, and projects that were relying on NQP will still be able to work with it. However, the new NQP-RX is developed on github and snapshots of it are kept in the extensions directory in the Parrot repo too.

nqpTAP

Every project in the Parrot ecosystem that I have seen makes extensive use of unit testing. Some projects are test-driven, though the majority seem to use post-facto tests for verification and to prevent recursion. Whatever the purpose, tests are everywhere and the TAP standard is used by almost all of them.

the nqpTAP project, started by dukeleto and based on his work in Plumage, is a pure-Parrot TAP harness that executes tests and summarizes results without depending on anything besides Parrot itself. Keeping dependencies low is always a good thing, and nqpTAP helps to reduce the barrier to new projects looking to create a proper test suite. Even better, nqpTAP targets the new NQP-RX, so it will be stable and working long into the future.

These three projects are very interesting, and I think it's worthwhile to give them at least a first look.