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It's in extensive use by Apple on the iPhone and in XCode, and outside Apple. The JVM is also well understood and widely deployed.

By comparison the Parrot project with the widest use is Rakudo, which is still just at a testing stage. Maybe there's some larger user of Parrot that I haven't heard about, so correct me if I'm wrong.

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Lua 5.2 has been feature complete on Parrot for years. Like LLVM and the JVM, we'll keep tuning and improving and fixing bugs and adding features to make language implementation easier, but the correlation between "maturity" and "use" is strong.

That's interesting. Are there any recent benchmarks of Lua on Parrot v.s. LuaJIT? The only thing I could find was this from 2007 where it was ~2 orders of magnitude slower: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.internals/2007/09/...

The URL to the benchmark script was broken so I couldn't run it.

Don't get me wrong, I think Parrot's very neat. But I could see why compiler implementors would be sceptical of it since it's not feature complete, and seemingly not very optimized. So there's a lot of unknowns.

fyi - with the JDK7 - the JVM can also target the LLVM (for JIT'ing) through Project Zero (http://openjdk.java.net/projects/zero/)

One Bytecode to rule them all, One Bytecode to find them, One Bytecodeto bring them all and in the darkness bind them

:-)

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