[Mono-devel-list] PHP and mono

[Jonathan Stowe]

On Wed, 2004-10-13 at 16:23, Robert Hostetter wrote:
> Why target parrot as many are talking about PHP doing in the future? 
> Wouldn't mono be more ideal?  If all the P languages (Python, PHP, and
> Perl) targetted mono the energy could be devoted to a common
> infrastructure (mod_mono).  

I think you are missing something here.  Parrot is intended as a virtual
machine for the efficient execution of bytecode for 'interpreted
languages', specifically Perl 6 (although there are compilers for other
languages that target Parrot at the moment.)

The parrot FAQ (at http://www.parrotcode.org/faq/ ) says:

        Why your own virtual machine? Why not compile to JVM/.NET?
        
        Those VMs are designed for statically typed languages. That's
        fine, since Java, C#, and lots of other languages are statically
        typed. Perl isn't. For a variety of reasons, it means that Perl
        would run more slowly there than on an interpreter geared
        towards dynamic languages.
        
        The .NET VM didn't even exist when we started development, or at
        least we didn't know about it when we were working on the
        design. We do now, though it's still not suitable.

So it is not like someone has created an entirely different VM just for
the hell of it - it was designed and made for a specific purpose which
no existing VM could fulfill at the time the decision was made.

Also you should bear in mind that while PHP is predominantly used for
dynamic web content, the same can't be said for either Perl or Python
which are far more general purpose.

Of course if you are keen to see something happen in the open source
world nothing impresses quite like working code :-)

/J\
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