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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Definitely an interesting project.

It would be interesting to compare this to parrot[1], which had similar goals.

Javascript and the JVM are currently occupying this niche to a certain degree, although neither were originally designed for this niche.

1: http://www.parrot.org/

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Anyone having an idea why parrot is not more popular?

Because it's associated with Perl 6 which is commenly believed to be vaporware (yes, even if there have been releases). And because they want to make it so perfect that people can't remember why they used to be excited about it.

FWIW, the problem with their having been "releases" is that there is no reference release; Larry Wall is uninterested in doing an implementation.

>Because it's associated with Perl 6 which is commenly believed to be vaporware

Or rather just "because it's associated with Perl".

Because it's not really a good VM.

It's full of good ideas, but also full of cruft and years of technical debt. It doesn't have a JIT compiler, (nearly) no async IO, threading support is pretty new and not battle-tested nor documented very well.

Sounds like Perl 6!

Actually, that's part of the issue. Most of Parrot's semantics are exactly those of Perl 6 (right down to the opcodes for Boolean testing), and those don't get along well with most languages.

Rakudo on the JVM does use a JIT compiler. Surprise!

The fact that Rakudo on the JVM can take advantage of the JIT to optimize simple math in tight loops fails to impress me, but I suppose it's one more half-implemented feature you can tick off the back of the box, so hooray.

Because supporting the Rakudo attempt to implement Perl 6 turned out to be an unpleasant slog through an unnavigable field of abuse and nonsense:

http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2013/02/goodnight-parrot.h...

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