Thursday, November 16, 2006

Chip Salzenberg, The Parrot Pump King

Just off the heels of the Chicago Perl Hack-A-Thon, which focused very much on Parrot, I have a great interview with Chip Salzenberg. Chip is a past Perl 5 Pump King and is the current Parrot Pump King.

Parrot, as many of you know, is a virtual machine that is intended be a platform for running Perl 6. Actually, the Parrot virtual machine hopes to run many languages other than Perl 6. There is currently beginning implementations of many languages on Parrot including Ruby and TCL. Parrot is different than many other virtual machines that we know of. It is register-based, as opposed to the common stack-based architectures, and it is designed to run dynamic languages.

Listen to hear what Chip has to say about the state of Parrot and what you can do to help out.