One of the advantages of a common virtual machine for various languages is the ability to apply the same optimizations to all of those languages. For example, LLVM includes optimization passes to propagate constants, eliminate dead arguments, code, and globals, inline functions, and eliminate recursive tail calls, among others. Any language with a compiler to LLVM can easily take advantage of these optimizations without any additional work by the compiler writer.

The Grapheme Normal Form for Unicode (or NFG as we like to call it) has been specified as a feature parrot wants for a long time, it's been in the Parrot Design Document for strings since before I had a commit bit, or any involvement in the project come to that. Something that has gone that long unimplemented can't be that important, right? I mean, we clearly have survived without it. Turns out it is important, but it takes some background to realize why.

Seattle, WA — April 26, 2010  Parrot Foundation is pleased to announce the acceptance of five student proposals for projects relating to the Parrot Virtual Machine in the 2010 Google Summer of Code program.

The parrot-users mailing list is now available; if you are a language author targeting parrot and have questions or need assistance, please sign up at http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-users.

You can also follow the group via google at http://groups.google.com/group/parrot-users

"Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and
execute bytecode for dynamic languages. This mailing list is for
general users of Parrot and languages running on Parrot."

The Parrot Foundation held its annual members' meeting on August 25th, 2009 at 2pm Pacific time in Seattle, Washington, USA. Jerry Gay presided over the meeting. Allison Randal prepared these minutes.

Discussion about Parrot development normally takes place in two places:

1. The parrot-dev mailing list:

   Subscribe to the list through the web interface, or go to the Google Group for a searchable archive and RSS/Atom feed.

2. And on IRC in #parrot at irc.parrot.org.

There is documentation in the docs subdirectory of the Parrot source from the latest release.