RE: Little status update

Arthur Bergman:
# Not much have been done yet, I am looking at various strategies for
# quickly and dirty linking the two build system together, and to this I
# have to learn how the parrot build system works, hopefully it
shouldn't
# be to far off.

As the guy who wrote the thing, I can at least give you an overview.
Parrot Configure inherits a lot of defaults from Perl 5's
configuration--practically the first thing it does is load up Config.pm
and copy over a bunch of stuff.  After that, it mostly builds a bunch of
test C files to probe for certain things and then writes out a bunch of
Makefiles and a few headers.  Configure is written in Perl 5.

Make takes over, doing its thing, with lots of help from Perl 5 scripts.
The test harness is also Perl.

Obviously we either need a bootstrapping Ponie or (more likely in the
short term) a copy of normal Perl 5 on the system.  Parrot will
*eventually* have a two-part bootstrapping system (use platform-specific
shell scripts to build a basic miniparrot, then use miniparrot to drive
the build process for full Parrot), but that's probably a long way off.

# The idea is to build a ponie executable wich creates and runs a perl
# interpreter, however perl links against parrot and PerlInterpreter
gets
# its' own Parrot Interpreter to keep. When that is done, that shall be
# the first snapshot of Ponie :)

Sounds good.  I'm gonna be gone for two weeks, but I'll have a laptop
with me--if I can sneak a toolkit onto it, I'll see if I can somehow
build a more direct bridge between perly and imcc.  (Don't bet on it,
though...)

--Brent Dax <[email protected]>
Perl and Parrot hacker
 
"Yeah, and my underwear is flame-retardant--that doesn't mean I'm gonna
set myself on fire to prove it."