Showing posts with label ParrotProjects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ParrotProjects. Show all posts
Monday, March 1, 2010
NQ-NQP Blog
A few days ago I mentioned an interesting new project called NQ-NQP, an implementation of the NQP language with a flex/bison frontend and an LLVM code generating backend. I've heard tonight that he's started blogging about it. Anybody who is interested in NQP or LLVM stuff might do well to give it a read.
Monday, February 22, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Parrot Project Proliferation Part 2
It's part two of my series on Parrot-related projects. There are a handful of these cool new projects that I know about, but I would love to hear some ideas from readers too. We can't give too much free publicity to cool Parrot projects!
Kakapo
NQP is a thin subset of the Perl6 syntax that's used as part of PCT to help build compilers. It's a very nice little language that tends to be relatively close to the underlying PIR code, and it's a real big help when building compilers. Part of the charm of NQP is that it doesn't include a runtime library. It's a bare-bones language, and provides only the few features necessary to build compilers.
Sometimes people using NQP are interested in a runtime library anyway. Sometimes, people need more then what the bare NQP compiler provides. To this end the Kakapo project, started by Austin Hastings, aims to provide a runtime of interesting functions that the NQP coder can use to perform common tasks. There are helpful objects, methods, and subroutines that can be used to interact with Parrot in a more natural way then having to descend into streams of inlined PIR.
Kakapo is a really interesting project, because it serves a few purposes:
Blizkost
Blizkost, started by Johnathan Worthington, is a project that I never thought I would ever see: Perl5 on Parrot.
Let that sink in for a minute. Perl5 is so idiosyncratic that there only is, and can really only be, one implementation. The official Perl5 specification is whatever the official Perl5 executable happens to parse and execute. The solution to work around this single-implementation problem is to simply embed the Perl5 interpreter into Parrot, instead of trying to develop a new parser from the ground up.
This is what Blizkost does: It implements a handful of new PMC types that act as wrapper for the Perl5 interpreter object and the various Perl5 object types. These PMC types allow Parrot programs to call into Perl5 code, and receive returned results back. Current functionality is limited, but there are a handful of interested (and talented!) contributors. If you know a thing or two about Perl5 internals, I'm sure they could use some help.
Winxed
NotFound started a very interesting little project: a javascript-like language compiler named Winxed. The twist is that instead of using PCT like most other projects do, he hand-wrote the lexer, parser, and code generators in C++.
Technically the word "compiler" covers a wide range of utilities, but most casual coders would probably refer to it as a "translator" instead. Winxed takes the javascript-like language input and outputs plain-text PIR code which can be compiled and executed by Parrot.
Kakapo
NQP is a thin subset of the Perl6 syntax that's used as part of PCT to help build compilers. It's a very nice little language that tends to be relatively close to the underlying PIR code, and it's a real big help when building compilers. Part of the charm of NQP is that it doesn't include a runtime library. It's a bare-bones language, and provides only the few features necessary to build compilers.
Sometimes people using NQP are interested in a runtime library anyway. Sometimes, people need more then what the bare NQP compiler provides. To this end the Kakapo project, started by Austin Hastings, aims to provide a runtime of interesting functions that the NQP coder can use to perform common tasks. There are helpful objects, methods, and subroutines that can be used to interact with Parrot in a more natural way then having to descend into streams of inlined PIR.
Kakapo is a really interesting project, because it serves a few purposes:
- Offers to turn NQP from just "a part of PCT" into a full-fledged and fully-capable programming language for Parrot development.
- Provides some interesting and effort-reducing utilities that can be used by compiler designers to get off to a quicker start
- Provides those utilities in a way that can be used from PIR programs and programs written in other languages on Parrot
Blizkost
Blizkost, started by Johnathan Worthington, is a project that I never thought I would ever see: Perl5 on Parrot.
Let that sink in for a minute. Perl5 is so idiosyncratic that there only is, and can really only be, one implementation. The official Perl5 specification is whatever the official Perl5 executable happens to parse and execute. The solution to work around this single-implementation problem is to simply embed the Perl5 interpreter into Parrot, instead of trying to develop a new parser from the ground up.
This is what Blizkost does: It implements a handful of new PMC types that act as wrapper for the Perl5 interpreter object and the various Perl5 object types. These PMC types allow Parrot programs to call into Perl5 code, and receive returned results back. Current functionality is limited, but there are a handful of interested (and talented!) contributors. If you know a thing or two about Perl5 internals, I'm sure they could use some help.
Winxed
NotFound started a very interesting little project: a javascript-like language compiler named Winxed. The twist is that instead of using PCT like most other projects do, he hand-wrote the lexer, parser, and code generators in C++.
Technically the word "compiler" covers a wide range of utilities, but most casual coders would probably refer to it as a "translator" instead. Winxed takes the javascript-like language input and outputs plain-text PIR code which can be compiled and executed by Parrot.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Parrot Project Proliferation Part 1
It seems I can't shake a stick without hitting a new Parrot-related development project. They're everywhere, increasing in number, attracting new contributors, and growing like wildfire. We all know about Rakudo, so I don't need to give them any more free advertising. But there are plenty of newer, smaller projects that could use a little bit of exposure. So, in a small miniseries of posts, I would like to discuss some of the new Parrot-related projects that are worth some attention:
Smart-Make
There haven't been any commits to the project in about a month now, judging from the commit log on the project website. However, this is still a very cool project that I've wanted to tackle myself for some time. It's Smart-Make, a "make" variant implemented on top of Parrot. It supports compatibility for GNU Make, but also appears to implement another, better, syntax as well. I'm not versed on all the details of it, but it looks like it could be an awesome project and an absolute staple of the Parrot development world.
I've wanted to put together a build tool on Parrot for a while now. There are a few reasons for this:
Plumage
I've mentioned it a few times, but I don't think I've really described it. Plumage is to Parrot approximately as CPAN is to Perl5. It's the "Module Ecosystem", a central metadata repository that helps coordinate a wide array of interdependent projects. I haven't done more then a cursory walkabout in Plumage, but it looks like a really great start for now. Plus, I'm happy that Matrixy and Parrot-Linear-Algebra are being tracked with it.
Eventually, all the installation directions for Matrixy and Parrot-Linear-Algebra will say "Use Plumage", it will just work, and everything will be very easy.
PL/Parrot
When I heard about this one I got excited: I thought it was a PL/1 compiler for Parrot. I mean, I wouldn't ever write a program in PL/1 other then some cutesy proof-of-concept stuff. But it would be cool to have in a "we have more nerd cred then you" kind of way.
Fortunately for everybody, PL/Parrot is not a PL/1 compiler. It's bindings for PostgreSQL. Or, it will be.
PostgreSQL has a cool interface that allows procedural programming languages to be plugged in to it. By writing a binding for Parrot, suddenly we get the ability to plug in any language that runs on Parrot into PostgreSQL without having to duplicate any of the effort. Cool no?
Other Projects
I'd like to highlight other Parrot-related projects here on my blog. Start a cool one yourself? Know somebody who's started one? I'd love to hear about it and I would love to talk about it here.
Smart-Make
There haven't been any commits to the project in about a month now, judging from the commit log on the project website. However, this is still a very cool project that I've wanted to tackle myself for some time. It's Smart-Make, a "make" variant implemented on top of Parrot. It supports compatibility for GNU Make, but also appears to implement another, better, syntax as well. I'm not versed on all the details of it, but it looks like it could be an awesome project and an absolute staple of the Parrot development world.
I've wanted to put together a build tool on Parrot for a while now. There are a few reasons for this:
- I've always hated the syntax of GNU Make, and anything that could improve on that would be awesome.
- A rule-based decision engine or inference engine could be the backbone for a large number of projects. Prolog is a great example.
Plumage
I've mentioned it a few times, but I don't think I've really described it. Plumage is to Parrot approximately as CPAN is to Perl5. It's the "Module Ecosystem", a central metadata repository that helps coordinate a wide array of interdependent projects. I haven't done more then a cursory walkabout in Plumage, but it looks like a really great start for now. Plus, I'm happy that Matrixy and Parrot-Linear-Algebra are being tracked with it.
Eventually, all the installation directions for Matrixy and Parrot-Linear-Algebra will say "Use Plumage", it will just work, and everything will be very easy.
PL/Parrot
When I heard about this one I got excited: I thought it was a PL/1 compiler for Parrot. I mean, I wouldn't ever write a program in PL/1 other then some cutesy proof-of-concept stuff. But it would be cool to have in a "we have more nerd cred then you" kind of way.
Fortunately for everybody, PL/Parrot is not a PL/1 compiler. It's bindings for PostgreSQL. Or, it will be.
PostgreSQL has a cool interface that allows procedural programming languages to be plugged in to it. By writing a binding for Parrot, suddenly we get the ability to plug in any language that runs on Parrot into PostgreSQL without having to duplicate any of the effort. Cool no?
Other Projects
I'd like to highlight other Parrot-related projects here on my blog. Start a cool one yourself? Know somebody who's started one? I'd love to hear about it and I would love to talk about it here.
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