I went to my first meetup last night, it was fun!

The talk of the night is about Parrot, a VM for dynamic language. It was presented by Allison Randal.

Parrot aims to provide a lean and efficient VM environment to run any dynamic language. Currently it is able to execute many popular script language like Tcl, Ruby, PHP, Python, and Perl. It has a compiler facility to parse and compile (JIT) scripts into internal bytecode for execution. This allows developer to define parser for new and existing language. One interesting design of Parrot is its register-based architecture, as compared to stack-based. It is contribute as one of the factors that make Parrot's performance.

Parrot is scheduled release 1.0 in Spring, a PHP extension is available, which is able to run part of PHP. I hope it will be ready for production in the near future.

Next month's topic going to be on memcacahed, I am so looking forward to it.