From: Phil Tomson Date: 2002-04-27T10:13:41+09:00 Subject: Re: Cardinal project page on Savannah On Sat, 27 Apr 2002, Euan Mee wrote: > On 20 Apr 2002, at 15:50, Phil Tomson wrote: > > I started a Cardinal project page at Savannah. Those who are > > interested in following Cardinal development should sign up for > > the cardinal-dev mailing list there. > > > > http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/cardinal/ > > I checked out the URL. It said 'The purpose of the Cardinal > project is to create a Ruby frontend for Parrot.'. > > So, the obvious question is, what is Parrot, and what is it for? Parrot is the Virtual Machine being developed for Perl6. The Parrot folks are designing a rather sophisticated registered (as opposed to stack based) VM that promises to deliver much higher performace than the current Perl VM - in fact Dan Sugalski reports up to a 5x performance boost over the current PerlVM. Parrot is also designed to make it easy to plug in other frontend languages besides Perl. So Cardinal's goal is to produce a Ruby frontend for Parrot. By doing this we get three big wins: 1) A performance boost over the current implemenation of Ruby: Sure there are some different projects out there for producing a VM for Ruby, but so far there doesn't seem to be much going on. Ruby is going to fall behind in the performance department if we don't do something. The Parrot folks are already working on their high-performance VM so why not use it? 2) We'll get to access Perl's vast CPAN libraries from Ruby. 3) Perl is installed everywhere. Chances are that Perl6 will eventually be installed everywhere. Ruby is not currently installed everywhere so when people want to use Ruby for various web uses they have to find a host that runs Ruby (which isn't always easy to do). Cardinal could vastly increase Ruby's installed base. For more info, see: http://parrotcode.org Phil