Parrot virtual machine

Parrot is a register-based process virtual machine designed to run dynamic languages efficiently. It is possible to compile Parrot assembly language and PIR (an intermediate language) to Parrot bytecode and execute it. Parrot is free and open source software.

Parrot was started by the Perl community and is developed with help from the open source and free software communities. As a result, it is focused on license compatibility with Perl (Artistic License 2.0), platform compatibility across a broad array of systems, processor architecture compatibility across most modern processors, speed of execution, small size (around 700k depending on platform), and the flexibility to handle the varying demands made by Perl 6 and other modern dynamic languages.

Version 1.0, with a stable API for development, was released on March 17, 2009.

The current version is release 7.9.0 "Sangihe hanging parrot"

History

The name Parrot came from an April Fool's joke which announced a hypothetical language, named Parrot, that would unify Python and Perl. The name was later adopted by this project (initially a part of the Perl 6 development effort) which aims to support Perl 6, Python, and other programming languages. Several languages are being ported to run on the Parrot virtual machine.

Virtual machine

In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is an emulation of a particular computer system. Virtual machines operate based on the computer architecture and functions of a real or hypothetical computer, and their implementations may involve specialized hardware, software, or a combination of both.

Various different kinds of virtual machines exist, each with different functions. System virtual machines (also known as full virtualization VMs) provide a complete substitute for the targeted real machine and a level of functionality required for the execution of a complete operating system. A hypervisor uses native execution to share and manage hardware, allowing multiple different environments, isolated from each other, to be executed on the same physical machine. Modern hypervisors use hardware-assisted virtualization, which provides efficient and full virtualization by using virtualization-specific hardware capabilities, primarily from the host CPUs. Process virtual machines are designed to execute a single computer program by providing an abstracted and platform-independent program execution environment. Some virtual machines, such as QEMU, are designed to also emulate different architectures and allow execution of software applications and operating systems written for another CPU or architecture. Operating-system-level virtualization allows the resources of a computer to be partitioned via the kernel's support for multiple isolated user space instances, which are usually called containers and may look and feel like real machines to the end users.