On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 11:48:07AM +0300, Nikolay Ananiev wrote: > Maybe we have to search harder for new ways to advertise Parrot to other > communities and get new developers and supporters to the project. > Currently, Parrot looks too Perlish and is mainly supported by the Perl > community. > I think that has to change.
Do you have any ideas on how to achieve this? I guess that the most obvious current thing that ties Parrot to the Perl community is that Parrot requires a copy of Perl to bootstrap, and all the build tools are written in Perl 5. I know that Perl 5's build system attempts to get a minimal Perl 5 binary bootstrapped as early as possible, and then does the rest of the build using Perl 5 programs running on it. I've just tried out Ruby, Python and Lua. Akin to Perl, Ruby builds a miniruby, and then uses that to build the extensions. Python doesn't build a minipython, but does use the Python binary as part of the extension build process. Lua is the odd one out - it doesn't ship with a Configure script, just a Makefile, and doesn't appear to build anything outside the main source directory. So Parrot is the odd one out here, for relying on an external language for its extended build process. I'm not sure if this is significant. Nicholas Clark
