Parrot is the virtual machine originally designed for Perl 6.
What technical capabilities does the Parrot VM offer that competing virtual machines such as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM)/Hotspot VM and Common Language Runtime (CLR) lack?
7 Answers
I don't know JVM and CLR enough, but my tips:
- dynamic languages (closures, polymorphic scalars, continuations, co-routines) support (speed)
- dynamic method dispatch,
- first class functions,
- first-class continuations,
- parameters (optional, named, ..),
- register based
- has HLL interoperability provided at an assembly level
- range of platforms
Update: This is probably irrelevant as JVM is one of Rakudo Perl 6 backends nowadays. See Rakudo Perl 6 on the JVM (Perl 6 Advent calendar 2013, Day 3).
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