From: Frodo Morris <graham.lee@...>
Date: 2002-11-06T21:45:09+09:00
Subject: Re: A vision for Parrot

Benjamin Goldberg wrote:
> Frodo Morris wrote:
> 
>>Benjamin Goldberg wrote:
>>
>>>Frodo Morris wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>Daniel Pfeiffer wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>Hi,
>>>>>Apache would essentially have a mod_parrot.  Maybe, if this can be
>>>>>tested very hard, we'd even have a Parrot kernel module for all
>>>>>Unices supporting that.  Then exec() could perform compiled scripts
>>>>>right away, like machine code :-)
>>>>
>>>>I would have thought that a more platform-independent version of
>>>>this would be, say, a parrotd, which sits on top of the kernel,
>>>>intercepts calls to exec() bytecode and spawns the relevant
>>>>processes.
>>>
>>>
>>>What advantage would this have over putting a #! line in the
>>>bytecode?
>>>
>>
>>Faster, better, cheaper.
>>Imagine if parrot could understand all interpreted code.
> 
> 
> It can't.  Parrot can only understand parrot bytecode.
> 
> 
>>Why not leave it running, so that any Perl/Python/Tcl/Ruby/Java/sh/
>>BASIC/whatever code can get to it immediately?
> 
> 
> Ignoring the problem of compiling those languages down to parrot
> bytecode...
> 
> How should the kernel detect that a parrot-bytecode file is, in fact,
> parrot bytecode?
> 
> For normal exe files, there's the execute bit and some standard headers.
> For normal scripts, there's the execute bit and the #! line.
It would be advantageous to performance if a pre-byte-compiled version 
of the script hangs around that can be launched directly by parrot. 
IANAE but doesn't Python do this already?  And doesn't Java *require* this?
-- 
FM