Re: Prothon 0.1.2 is getting close to Alpha [Prothon]

[ CC'ed all + perl6-internals so fullquote ]

Mark Hahn wrote:
> I have been looking over Parrot in consideration as a foundation for
> Prothon.  Let me give you some of my thoughts and ask another question or
> two.  Feel free to pass this on to any or all on the Parrot team.
> 
> Prothon is a small development effort.  While many have been contributing to
> the intellectual design, there are only two of us on the development team at
> this time.  This means we don't have the luxury of "trying out" Parrot as a
> research project on the side.  We need to make a decision to go with Parrot
> or not.  So this is a big decision for us.
> 
> We have been using the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) as our foundation and
> it has been a very pleasant experience.  I have been doing the main
> development track in Windows' Visual Studio and it has run on all the other
> platforms with barely a hitch.  We would be giving up APR for Parrot.  So
> this isn't an argument of homegrown vs. Parrot, it is APR versus Parrot.
> 
> Now let me ask you about my concerns.
> 
> 1) The talks I read on the site mentioned many exiciting features to come
> like parsing and optimizing for different languages.  These talks are two
> years old and it doesn't seem to me like there has been any progress in the
> two years since the talks were given.  What progress has been made in the
> last two years?  What is the current schedule for Perl 6?  How realistic is
> that schedule?  What is the schedule for a real library?  How realistic is
> that schedule?  How many developers are actively contributing to Parrot
> every week?

There are currently discussions on plans to get Perl6 running within a 
year. But the first language, Parrot will run is hopefully Python. There 
are around 10 contributors, but currently it's rather quiet.

Hopefully Dan will answer the other questions.

> 2) I downloaded the CVS tree and I couldn't find any build instructions for
> windows.  

README.win32

> ... I didn't look very hard but I couldn't find any C files.  

Most is in /src. /classes holds another bunch of files named .pmc, which 
are converted to .c

>  I saw a
> lot of .pod files.  What are those?  The faq said Parrot was written in C.

That's Perl documentation format, plain text with some markup for 
headings and such.

> 3) Is there someone on the develpment team who could hold my hand in the
> beginning to get me going with Parrot in Visual Studio?  After a brief
> period I'm sure I could not only stand on my own but I could become a main
> support point for Parrot on win32/VS.

Win32 people, please answer ;) - That would be really great.

> If you don't mind, let me make a quick sales pitch.  Prothon has been
> developed by some of the top Python minds and is turning out to be an
> superior alternative to the mythical Python 3.  Don't let the
> prototype-based versus class-based stuff confuse you. Prothon can do
> everything Python can do including class-based designs.  Check out the
> Prothon tutorial and mailing list archives.  I think you will be hearing a
> lot more about Prothon as time goes on.

I'm currently tied up with getting Python running. I'll have a look at 
it in August.

leo