*sigh*
I'm long overdue for a rant.
I'm very happy with the progress Parrot has made, but that is because I
took a year off. Otherwise, it would have been like watching a pot
waiting for it to boil.
However, some things have not changed, like.... us.
We try to tackle too many NEW large problems and spend time
arguing them while there are many things that we needed a year ago
and still need them today.
This is my list, not Dan's so he may disagree:
1) We should have a complete bytecode spec, with metadata and
symbol tables and classes.
2) We should have support for classes and methods in the core
3) We should have class/method syntax in IMCC (working on this)
so people can define these in a notation that makes sense.
4) We should have a complete IO system
5) We should have a regex core and functional regex compiler. We had
started on this but disagreement on approach and developer
bandwidth seems to have stopped this.
6) We should have at least ONE semi-stable high level language
that allows us to write REAL software on Parrot and use all of the
above features.
Number 6 is where we really look bad compared to other VM efforts
out there. We have a huge directory of partially working languages but
nothing works besides trivial hello world style samples.
Until we get there, I won't give a flip about whether we serialize in XML
or
morse code.
There are also tons of academic material available on all the issues
of late. Garbage collection, cylic issues, serialization, finalization and
destruction. Not to even MENTION compiler development. We should
be referencing books and papers in these discussions more than we
have been, because these problems have been solved in
various ways, many times.
Working, bad implementations (straw men as some of us call it) are
better than nothing at all.
-Melvin
