Example 2: Python on Parrot -- under the hood

Proposal Information

This proposal was written and submitted by Dr. Patrick R. Michaud for PyCon 2007.

All the information in this section, except the Description, will be made public if the proposal is accepted.
After you submit your proposal you will be able to make edits to all the fields below, assign Co-Authors, attach files, and communicate with the reviewers.
Durring the review process other authors will be able to see this information to help foster communication between like proposals.
Just because there are multiple proposals on a subject does not mean that only one will be accepted.
See the Call for Proposals for detailed instructions.

Title:

The first impression reviewers and attendees will have of your talk is its title.
Some media such as the printed schedule will only have the talk title.
Panel discussions should have a title with the prefix 'Panel: '

Duration:

If you wish a different duration than those listed, leave a comment to that effect on the submitted proposal.
Panel discussions must be 45min long.

Level:

Categories:

Examples: games, software development, testing, web framework

Summary:

This summary will be included in the talks listing, the schedule, and conference materials.
The summary is pre-formated text. Newlines and indenting is preserved.
Any links discovered will be made clickable. (i.e. google.com, http://www.example.com/foo/)

Description:

Over the past few years the Perl community has been designing and
developing Parrot, a virtual machine interpreter for dynamic languages.
While this virtual machine is obviously intended to support compilation
in Perl, a fundamental design goal of Parrot is also to provide language
interoperability at the bytecode level with many scripting languages,
including (especially) Python, Ruby, Tcl, and others.

Within the past year, Parrot has developed a number of advanced tools
for implementing language translators.  The parser grammar engine (PGE)
makes it simple to develop language parsers for Parrot, while the
tree grammar engine (TGE) provides a attribute-grammar-based structure
for translating parse trees into executable bytecode.  While both PGE
and TGE are continuing development, they are being successfully used
in the development of compilers and translators for Perl 6,
Tcl, Ruby, and APL, and work is being performed for other languages
such as Python and JavaScript.

This talk continues from the previous talk ("Python on 
Parrot -- overview") by providing the implementation details 
for a Python compiler in Parrot.  The talk gives a detailed 
look at the Parrot compiler toolkits, and walks through the 
grammar, parser, and translation into executable code.

The talk is aimed at people who are interested in virtual machines,
are somewhat aware of the Parrot virtual machine (e.g., from the
first talk), and want to know more of the technical details of
how things work.

I've indicated this talk as a 45-minute talk, because there is
a lot of material to be covered here (and I'd like to leave
plenty of time for questions).  If necessary for scheduling
reasons I can likely squeeze the talk down to a 30 minute
presentation.

Talk outline
  - status of the compiler (with demos)
  - detailed introduction to PGE and TGE (with demos)
  - Parrot's AST
  - degree of compatibility with existing Python interpreters
  - handling C-based modules
  - integrating Python with other languages and modules
  - current performance
  - next steps in development

The detailed description is for the purpose of reviewing the proposal. Only reviewers, authors, and organizers will see it. Portions may be extracted for the website.

Be sure to include the following:

A detailed outline (include timing)
Notes for reviewers
Recording: indicate if you are amenable to your talk being recorded. "I give permission to record and publish my PyCon presentation for free distribution."

        The description uses the ReStructuredText markup language.

        Formatting:
        *italic*, **bold**, ``literal``

Title
=====

  A block quote is
  just indented text

Subtitle
--------

::

    preformatted code block
    for code and the like

        italic, bold, literal
Title
A block quote is
just indented text
Subtitle
preformatted code block
for code and the like

            Lists:
            * one
* two
* three
            
one
two
three

            #. first
#. second
#. third
            
first
second
third

        Links:
        http://python.org/

`Python <http://python.org/>`_

`Python PEP index`_

.. _Python PEP index: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/

        http://python.org/
Python
Python PEP index

Cancel

advocacy
agile
ajax
animation
archiving
artificial intelligence
ast
best-practices
biology
business
business case
case study
cli
cloud computing
command line tools
community
community sites
complexity
concurrency
core
coroutines
coverage
databases
digital libraries
distributed
django
documentation
dotnet
easy
easy to develop
ecommerce
education
eggs
embedding
engineering
extensions
fast
fast web presence
finance
games
geography
geospatial
gis
google spreadsheets
graphics
gui
gui automation
handheld
html
ide
implementations
inkscape
integration
intergration
introspection
ironpython
javascript
jython
k-12
language
laser
legal
library
mailman
maps
mashup
metaprogramming
multimedia
network
nevow
object orientation
online databse
packaging
panel
parsing
paste
performance
plone
podcasting
preservation
project
py3k
pyblosxom
pylons
pypy
python newbie
roundup
science
security
shell
software
spreadsheets
storage
subversion
svg
system administration
technique
testing
text
turbogears
tutorial
twisted
unicode
university
usability
user interfaces
web
web cam
web development
web framework
web services
web-archiving
wsgi
wxpython
zope