Elliot Loves Perl

I’m going to the Parrot virtual machine workshop next weekend. The suggestion has been made that “anyone who is coming from out of town to attend the Parrot talks is already involved with Parrot” and the schedule is too introductory. I beg to differ.

I am not presently involved with Parrot, nor do I expect to be in the future; I’m already behind on the projects that I’m involved with or want/need to start. At most, I expect that I’ll be filing bug reports.

I’m expecting that I’ll be using things running on Parrot. I want to understand what’s going on underneath in order to make my life in understanding higher level things easier. As a point of comparison, there are some edge cases in Java’s behavior that you cannot understand without knowing how the Java virtual machine works.

I want to know how to drop to a lower level, if the higher level code running on the VM isn’t working out for some reason.

When dealing with Perl 6 specifically, I want to know what I can get at the Parrot bytecode level and what I need to do with STD.pm. I’m probably going to be involved in a Perl 6 version of Perl Critic and I’d like to know what would be possible in terms of a generic higher-level-language-running-on-Parrot critic. (Yes, I don’t know how to use a programming language that’s still not finished being designed and I’m already planning on to tell you that you’re using it wrong.)