Topic summary

Parrot virtual machine

Parrot virtual machine

Parrot is a discontinued register-basedprocess virtual machine designed to run dynamic languages efficiently. It is possible to compile Parrot assembly language (PASM) and Parrot intermediate representation (PIR, an intermediate language) to Parrot bytecode and execute it. Parrot is free and open-source software with an Artistic License 2.0.

Parrot was begun by the Perl community and developed with help from the open-source and free software communities. As a result, it was focused on license compatibility with Perl (Artistic License 2.0), platform compatibility across a broad array of systems, processor architecture compatibility across most modern processors, speed of execution, small size (around 700k depending on platform), and the flexibility to handle the varying demands made by Raku and other modern dynamic languages.

Version 1.0, with a stable application programming interface (API) for development, was released on March 17, 2009. The last version is release 8.1.0 "Andean Parakeet".