November 2009 Archives

Wouldn't it be awesome to write performance-critical stored procedures in a fast platform-independent language? That is the vision for PL/Parrot, a Postgres Language that will allow you to write stored procedures in PIR or NQP. Our current plan is to embed the Parrot VM inside each postgres backend. If you have a better idea, let us know!

Come hang out on #plparrot on irc.freenode.net or checkout the github repo if you want to help! You may also want to visit #parrot on irc.perl.org for Parrot-specific help. It is very much in a prototype stage right now, but we have lots of smart people interested in making this work, so I am confident that we will have something working very soon.

If you are a Postgres internals hacker or you want to learn more about Parrot Virtual Machine, we would greatly appreciate your help!

I am very proud to announce that Parrot Virtual Machine has been ported to RTEMS, a real-time embedded operating system (RTOS). Here is one of the first runs of Parrot code atop RTEMS, this example being the Fibonacci number benchmark with debug tracing turned on, posted by Chris Johns:

RTEMS SHELL (Ver.1.0-FRC):/dev/console. Oct 21 2009. 'help' to list commands.
fstst [/] # parrot -v p/benchmarks/fib.pir
debug = 0x0
Reading p/benchmarks/fib.pir
using optimization '-O' (0)
Starting parse...
sub _main:
        registers in .pir:       I3, N2, S1, P2
        0 labels, 0 lines deleted, 0 if_branch, 0 branch_branch
        0 branch_cond_loop
        0 used once deleted
        0 invariants_moved
        registers needed:        I3, N2, S1, P3
        registers in .pasm:      I3, N2, S1, P2 - 0
        4 basic_blocks, 4 edges  
sub _fib: 
        registers in .pir:       I5, N0, S0, P0
        0 labels, 0 lines deleted, 0 if_branch, 0 branch_branch
        0 branch_cond_loop
        0 used once deleted
        0 invariants_moved
        registers needed:        I5, N0, S0, P2
        registers in .pasm:      I5, N0, S0, P2 - 0
        5 basic_blocks, 5 edges  
1 lines compiled.
Running...
fib(28) = 317811 71.1315400600433s

Many many thanks to all who have helped. -- kiwichris

I met Chris Johns a.k.a. 'kiwichris', a core RTEMS developer, at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2009, and we have been attempting to get Parrot working on RTEMS ever since. With his extreme hard work and hand-tuned Makefile kung-fu, he cross-compiled Parrot, totally bypassing our configure/build system, which does not support cross-compiling!

Getting RTEMS working on Parrot definitely pointed out a few rough edges on Parrot's part, such as using powl() from math.h without checking for it, even though it is an *optional* POSIX extension. RTEMS does not currently have powl() so our string subsystem blew up. Thankfully, just replacing it with pow() works just fine, for now. I've added a ticket to add support for checking at Configure-time whether powl() exists, and to only use it then, which is the correct behavior.

Also, the Parrot exit handler calls the system exit() after all other exit handlers currently, which reboots a real-time OS like RTEMS. So we are going to have to provide some interface to allow alternate final exit handlers.

But these issues are small, most of the hard work has already been done by Chris. At this point, we will start fixing our configure/build system so that a RTEMS cross-compile can be done with a Configure.pl flag, such as

perl Configure.pl --cross=rtems-i386

Thanks again to Chris Johns and all RTEMS/Parrot core developers that helped make this possible.

Stay tuned to the intertubes for more updates about Parrot on RTEMS!