Allison Randal -
Speaking Topic: Programming Parrot

Allison is a C and Perl hacker, architect and core developer of Parrot, on the board of directors of The Perl Foundation, co-author of "Perl 6 & Parrot Essentials", and founder and president of Onyx Neon Press. She also works for O'Reilly Media, planning the program for their Open Source Convention (OSCON).

Abstract

Parrot is a virtual machine like no other. Targeting dynamic languages such as Perl, Ruby, Python and PHP, it incorporates an object-oriented assembly language, is register-based rather than stack-based, and employs continuations as the core means of flow control. It hosts a powerful suite of compiler tools tailored to dynamic languages and a next generation regular expression engine. This talk briefly explains the overall architecture of Parrot and teaches the skills needed to get started hacking in Parrot.