Final Grant Report for NLNet

This is the final grant report for the Parrot project's NLNet grant. It covers the time from November, 2009 until the release of Parrot 1.0 on March 17, 2009.

On December 16, the Parrot Foundation announced its "Vision for 1.0" document, which actually goes much further and lays out a vision for major release several years into the future. The 1.0 happened on March 17, 2009. This release provides a stable API for on which language developers can build. That means that all of the core subsystems are substantially complete, and that the compiler tools are featureful enough for serious use. The full document describing this vision can be found at http://www.parrot.org/news/vision-for-1_0.

As usual, Parrot released once per month. There were five releases in this time period, with a variety of improvements, both to the Parrot core engine, as well as language implementations, especially Rakudo.

Some of the highlights include multi-method dispatch (MMD) improvements, improvements in the compiler tools, especially the Parrot Grammar Engine (PGE), exceptions, and the initial IO implementation. Rakudo has seen huge leaps forward, including improvements in MMD, namespaces, list assignment, lexical handling, and much more. It's looking more and more like a real Perl 6 implementation.

As part of work towards a Parrot 1.0 release, most of the languages in the Parrot repository have been moved to their own repositories, and will have their own release schedules.

Allison completed the initial IO implementation in December of 2008, and received a payment of $2,000 for the work. The garbage collection implementation milestone was completed in January of 2009. For this milestone, chromatic received $1,500, and Andrew Whitworth received $500. The parrot compiler tools milestone has been completed by Andrew Whitworth, who received $2,000 for this work.

The character set and security model implementation has also been completed for the 1.0 release. The payment for the character set implementation was $1,000 for Allison, and $1,000 for Simon Cozens. Allison also received a $2,000 payment for the security model implementation.

We at the Parrot Foundation sincerely thank NLNet for their support of Parrot. In addition to providing fiscal support, this grant was crucially important in providing moral support for so many people who have worked on the Parrot project. We are thrilled that we could bring the grant to a proper conclusion with the release of Parrot 1.0. We look forward to Parrot's continued growth and improvement in the years to come.

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