ParrotProjects: February 2010 Edition

I haven't posted a ParrotProjects update in a while, but that doesn't mean development of new projects has slowed down at all. Quite the contrary, there are plenty of new projects popping up left and right.

Fun

I can't speak towards how enjoyable it might be, but Fun is an implementation of the Joy language on Parrot. It's still early in development, but it is exciting to have more functional languages targetting Parrot like this.

Digest-Dynpmcs

The Parrot repo currently contains a few dynamic PMCs (dynpmcs) for calculating digests such as MD1, MD4, MD5, and various SHA sums. It has been decided that these kinds of things should find a new home, so our own enterprising developer darbelo has forked them to a new home on Gitorious. Copies of these PMCs are still in the repo pending a deprecation cycle, but after the 2.3 release they will only live on Gitorious.

ParrotSDL

If you need to write any SDL applications, you might be excited to hear that bindings for the multimedia library for Parrot are in active development. ParrotSDL is still a new project and is navigating through some difficulties with Parrot's NCI system. The lead developer, Parrot newcomer kthakore, is also working on SDL bindings for Perl5, so he's very familiar with the whole system.

kthakore is looking for PIR coders to help with the project. Chat about ParrotSDL and the Perl port happens at irc://irc.perl.org/#sdl

NQ-NQP

You might think of NQP as being a language that only runs on Parrot, but you'd be wrong. Developer ash_ has been working on a variant of NQP that runs on top of LLVM instead. This compiler, which is not quite NQP, is a very interesting project and may help to inform our future use of LLVM for Parrot's JIT system.