[R] Parrot

[Luke Tierney]

The last time I looked at parrot (a couple of months or so ago, so
things may be quite different) parrot was still in very early
development stages (it had no proper memory management system yet, for
example). At this point it is still very unclear whether anyone
outside of perl is interested in what they are doing.  The python
folks in particular don't seem very excited about it as far as I can
tell.  The parrot folks have also made a number of unusal design
decisions that may or may not pan out in the end.  My impression is
that the presentation of their ideas at the Lightweight Languages
Workshop last year at MIT (http://ll1.mit.edu/) was not received with
overwhelming entusiasm by an audience who know something about this
stuff.  But who knows, it's still early days.

There is work in progress on compiling R to byte code for a virtual
machine that is specific to and optimized for R (includes things like
opcoded for vectorized arithmetic).  Once this is complete it should
be possible to use the R byte code as an intermediate language for
different back endt including portable assembly languages (C, C--,
e.g.), JVM byte code, .NET byte code, or maybe parrot byte code if
that project matures into something interesting.

luke

On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 10:57:05AM -0400, ggrothendieck at yifan.net wrote:
> This is just an idea for comment.  Perl6, the upcoming version of Perl has
> separated out the runtime into a virtual machine called Parrot.  There are
> already several small languages (one is C-like, one is Java-like and one is
> BASIC-like) that target Parrot and given the popularity of Perl its likely that
> others may attempt to target it too.
> 
> If R could interface easily with Parrot then it might be possible to use this
> to interface with a large number of scripting languages in the future with
> little or no additional interfacing work per language.
> 
> See www.parrotcode.org .
> 
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-- 
Luke Tierney
University of Minnesota                      Phone:           612-625-7843
School of Statistics                         Fax:             612-624-8868
313 Ford Hall, 224 Church St. S.E.           email:      luke at stat.umn.edu
Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA                    WWW:  http://www.stat.umn.edu
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