Home Original page

What is Python's answer to Perl 6?

John Roth newsgroups at jhrothjr.com
Sun Oct 31 17:08:56 EST 2004 
"Max M" <maxm at mxm.dk> wrote in message 
news:4184fa72$0$226$edfadb0f at dread12.news.tele.dk...
> Alex Martelli wrote:
>
>> There are, of course, several reasons for the Parrot people to do their
>> own VM rather than accept Microsoft's design (or Sun's, for that
>> matter).  I don't understand your "why" question...!
>
> "Why" as in "what is the difference, and the advantage of parrot", not as 
> in "Why do they want to do something as stupid"
>
> All the virtual machines seems to boost the same advantages for all the 
> languages.

Actually, they don't. Jython runs at about 1/3rd the speed as CPython.
I'm surprised that IronPython runs as fast as it does, although Microsoft's
attitude at making the  CLR a multi-language platform (as distinct from
Sun's deliberate direction to make the JVM a single-language
platform) may be part of the difference.

Given that nobody in the Perl camp is going to spend more than
a few chuckles at the idea of tying Perl 6 to a proprietary Microsoft
product, and the proven poor performance of the JVM for
dynamic languages, they really didn't have much of a choice in
rewriting their already existing virtual machine.

> So I just wondered if anybody had a few practical examples of the 
> difference, and why I should get excited over Parrot.

Parrot was originally intended to run both Perl 6 and Perl 5. Adding
Python was an afterthought, and somewhat a consequence of an
April Fools joke. Some people think it still is.

> So far, it seems like a better idea to get Python running on .net/mono, as 
> I cannot seem to get around the Windows platform in my professional work.

Shrug. I cannot get excited about a proprietary Microsoft platform.
If anyone wants to port IronPython to Mono, I suspect the path is
clear (although maybe not - I don't know the license for that.)

John Roth

>
> -- 
>
> hilsen/regards Max M, Denmark
>
> http://www.mxm.dk/
> IT's Mad Science
More information about the Python-list mailing list