On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 12:49:45PM -0700, Blair Zajac wrote:
> I haven't looked at Parrot too closely, but where does that fit into 
> this?  Would that not be considered a VM here?  Wouldn't Parrot be 
> pretty good because it supports Python and Perl which have more 
> functional aspects in them than C, C++ and Java?

I'm rather looking forward to Perl6 and Parrot.  In fact, I'm looking
forward even more to Perl5 and Parrot (some discussion here:
http://wiki.cocan.org/ocaml_and_lamp), because Perl5 is what I know,
and Perl6 looks like a radical new language to me and isn't
necessarily a sure thing.

The reason is that interfacing to Perl5 currently is a mess of macros,
sparsely documented reference counting, "magic" references and on and
on (see the source to perl4caml for the gory details).  Being able to
invoke a Parrot interpreter instead and making controlled calls into
the Perl is a much better solution.

In answer to the OP, since Perl tends to do lots of small allocations
and is somewhat functional, it seems like Parrot may be better suited
to functional languages.  More about Parrot & garbage collection,
although I'm still not sure if Parrot will do "proper" GC, or use
reference counting:

http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000200.html

Rich.

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