Ponie: Perl On New Internal Engine

caseywest writes "Today at his State of the Onion speech during the 2003 O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Larry Wall announced the Ponie project (somewhere within his legendary humorous presentation). Ponie involves rewriting central parts of the Perl 5 interpreter to run on Parrot, the Perl 6 virtual machine, including a C API emulation layer to make existing XS code work. Arthur 'sky' Bergman is sponsored by his employer Fotango to develop Ponie. Currently, a press release and a FAQ are available. More details will be available in due time."

Re:Pony??? I blame London.pm

[chromatic]

Good detective work! You're exactly right; the name was chosen (in part) to please London.pm.

I'll try to get the State of the Onion talk up on Perl.com or the O'Reilly Network tomorrow.

Re:Scheme

[baka_boy]

Last I heard, Parrot was definitely intended to support continuations, as a low-level primitive for microthreading, generators, and coroutines. At least that's what Dan told me at LL1, and what the Parrot dev list summaries seem to keep indicating. That's not to say that all languages compiling to Parrot will use continuations, of course, but it will be there for those (Scheme, Ruby, and perhaps some day Smalltalk?) that do.

Parrot is indeed designed to be a more dynamic runtime environment than Java, C#, etc., but that's really more of a compiler-level issue than a VM one -- i.e., compile-time type checking isn't something you implement at the VM level. And since Parrot supports a number of primitive types within the VM core, you could quite conceivably compile a low-level, C-like language to very efficient Parrot code.

Re:Scheme

[Elian]

Yup, we're doing continuations. We've actually switched to a full continuation-passing calling scheme, as it makes a number of things rather easier.

We have, however, hidden that in most cases, so you generally don't need to fiddle with, or even care about, continuations if you don't want to. They're certainly not exposed by default at the language level so the python folks, for example, will never have to deal with them. (Nor will the perl or ruby folks if they don't want to) It's only if you're writing assembly directly, and even then it's pretty darned easy to not have to think about them.