Parrot – everything we have heard so far seems wrong

Allison Randall gave a talk about what’s currently happening with Parrot. It seems they are going for a new rewrite of most of the subsystems. One of the changes is going from a CISC style op code system to a RISC style. Parrot apparently has over 1200 op codes at this point, and they want to scale back everything to about 20-30 bytecodes instead. As a preparation for this, they have ripped out the JIT and will revisit most of the subsystems in Parrot to see what can be done. Allison also gave the audience the distinct impression that Parrot is still quite slow for user programs.

It looks like everything we have heard so far and what we told others seems wrong. Isn’t that embarrassing?