Parrot 1.0.0

[This is a translation of my article in Italian language on Perl.it]

Sometimes things happen when few are still left to believe in them, nevertheless they are able to bring new enthusiasm and life to projects which seemed to be sentenced to a never ending gestational status. OK, I'm now going to come out of this "Barack Obama mode", but I hope I gave an idea of how much March 17, 2009, the date of the release of Parrot 1.0.0 is important for the Perl community (and not just for it).

Anyone who's got something to with Perl likely knows what Parrot is, but this moment deserves a brief refreshing about its main features. First of all, it's a virtual machine which aims at becoming the virtual machine. Even though its development started out from the Perl community, the goal is that other dynamic languages should be able - or even want - to use it as well, as Parrot will grant superior performance.

For other technical information, please read the Parrot Wikipedia page, as I'd like to write something about the second reason for which Parrot is important. It's maturation is fundamental to give a boost to Perl 6 development, in order to reach the much awaited first major release of our favourite language, an event we've been waiting for years: yt's current implementation, Rakudo, is being developed upon Parrot.

Many more steps still have to be performed, and maybe many folks will continue to state, as a joke or seriously, that Perl 6 will never see the light. However, as Parrot did, Perl 6 could surprise you as well.