In article <1012431069.17873.9.camel / detrius>,
Erik BéČfors  <Erik.Bagfors / ardendo.se> wrote:
>On Tue, 2002-01-29 at 00:19, Phil Tomson wrote: 
>
>>From talking to the parrot-people (well, dan anyway), trying parrot and
>reading the perl6-internal-mailinglist, I believe that parrot is not
>really ready for ruby yet.  It is still _very_ much under development
>(more than I thought).  However, this is our chance to get our feedback
>into the parrot-code so I think it's important that we work with them
>from now on. 

Good point: working with the parrot folks now lets us give them input.
Also the other goal is that even though Parrot isn't ready for prime time 
yet (and I didn't expect that it was yet) it would be good to have Ruby 
playing with it when it's ready.

>
>Since I'm really interested in this project but I don't want to be a
>leader I'd like to say what I think are important and what a leader
>should need to think about.  

Don't let that 'leader' title scare you.  Maybe it was an unfortunate 
choice of titles.  Basically, at this point Cardinal needs:
1) someone to think about what is needed to get Ruby working with Parrot
(You've been doing that)
2) someone to startup the project infrastructure: mailing lists, CVS 
repositories, etc (SourceForge or Savannah would be of great assistance 
here- I prefer Savannah, hint, hint).

>This is all from my point of view.
>
>The way I see it, there are four important areas to work with. 
>1) The ruby in ruby parser 
>2) The compiler to parrot bytecode 
>3) The ruby-classes that needs to go into parrot 
>4) Changes to parrot 
>
>for nr 1) there are lot's of people working with this for different
>reasons, some not related to parrot.  I think this is great and I also
>think that we should use as much of that knowledge and information as
>possible but we should try to drive them in a "parrot-direction" just
>yet.  The people doing this is doing a great job I think. 
>
>nr 2) This should take the information from the parser and generate
>parrot bytecode (of perhaps parrot assemby).  For this to work nr 3 have
>to be started.  I really don't see any reason to work with this just yet
>because things are too much in development right now. 
>
>nr 3) This is what I've been working with a little.  I really think that
>parrot is great and I don't think there will be any problems doing this
>once parrot is in a state that make's doable.  Implementing classes is
>not at all hard and considering that parrot needs to provide regexp's,
>IO-handling and other low level stuff for all languages, we shouldn't
>have to deal to much with stuff like that (of course, they will not mind
>our help :) ). 
>
>nr 4) This is were we should need someone who knows ruby by heart.  I
>know it's not me! :)  We need someone who is good at low level stuff and
>that can look into parrot and see if it's missing something that's
>important for ruby or if something simply is not right for ruby.  This
>should be done as soon as possible. 
>
>So.  The question is how many people are interested in working with
>this.  I know I am but I'm not ready to take any kind of leader roll,
>and my knowledge is not good enough to work with some parts of this. 
>
I'm definately interested, it's just that I've got something else on my 
plate right now and it'll be a few months before I can get back to 
Cardinal, in the meantime I think that there is work that someone can be 
doing on Cardinal and I think you've beed doing a good bit of it, Erik!

>I really think we need people for nr 4 and nr 3 now!  (nr 1 is already
>being worked on independently of ruby). 
>
>Anyway, I'm really really exited about this project!

yes, it's quite important for the long range...

Phil