On Thu, Nov 15, 2001 at 01:36:34PM +0000, Alberto Manuel Brandao Simoes wrote: > I had a conference about .NET and, what a surprise... this big title is > only another virtual machine. I don't know what .MONO is trying to do, but > isn't Parrot something like .NET, and usable that way?
There are a huge number of virtual machines out there. .NET CLR is, yes, just another one. But .NET is tuned for doing stuff with statically typed languages, such as C, C++, C#, Java and the like. It performs very badly when faced with dynamic languages such as Perl and Python. (If you don't believe me, talk to the guys at ActiveState who've had a hard time trying to compile Perl to .NET) If you like, you can think of Parrot as an equivalent to the CLR for dealing with dynamic languages. It might be safer, however, to think of it as a virtual machine optimized for running Perl 6. :) Mono is trying to completely replicate the .NET CLR as open source, so it doesn't give us anything (apart from the ability to look at interesting VM implementation techniques) more than .NET. -- VMS must die!
