From: Nikodemus Siivola <tsiivola@...>
Date: 2002-11-06T18:57:44+09:00
Subject: [OT] Re: A vision for Parrot


On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Andrew Dalke wrote:

> It didn't happen.  Writing those translators are hard because each
> of the languages has different object models, which must be implemented
> nearly perfectly.  Guile is a full-fledge language built on years of
> research into Lisp and scheme, so I would be surprised if it was any
> easier to implement in Parrot's byte code.  It didn't happen with
> Guile, it's even less likely to happen with Parrot.

1) There is a fundamental difference between the two projects:  at least
both Perl and Ruby people seem to be interested in using the VM as a
language backend, but I don't think anyone outside the Guile community was
interested in writing the aforementioned translators.

2) Using Parrot as a backend has speed as a carrot, while using Guile as a
backend has no carrot that I am aware of (ideologigal issues besides).

3) As far as Schemes go, Guile is rather bloated: if the application is
small, embedding Guile is a significant overhead.

  -- Nikodemus