M0 Roadmap Goals for Q3 2011

M0 has been coming down the pipeline for several months. It's still pretty raw and has a number of known functionality holes, but it's getting better by the week. I'd like to make the next few stages of M0 part of our official roadmap, so this post spells out the overall plan and what I think we can accomplish in the next three months.

M0 currently exists as a fairly hacky Perl 5 prototype. This is of necessity because Perl isn't generally intended to operate at the level that M0 requires. Perl is still serviceable as a prototype implementation language, but the form that will be integrated into Parrot will be written in C. There will be many stages between now and when the M0 migration is complete, but the goal I'll focus on is noop integration. I'll explain what I mean by that below.

I see Parrot's migration to M0 falling into 7 stages:

M0 Prototype

We're working out bugs in the Perl 5 M0 interpreter and making certain that M0 will be a sufficient foundation for Parrot. M0 may change significantly but we're making an effort to stabilize it.

C89 Implementation

We're happy with M0 and have a reasonably efficient compiler-agnostic implementation of M0, written in C89, which passes all tests. Separate compiler-specific implementations are fine, but not a priority.

Noop Integration

C/M0 is linked into libparrot and exposes an interface that C code can use to call into M0 code. At this point no subsystems have been reimplemented in M0.

Mole

We specify and implement Mole, which will be a C-family langauge that compiles directly to M0. Writing M0 is painful (this was an explicit design goal), so Mole is what a large chunk of the M0 that implements Parrot will be written in. M0 bytecode is what will be run from Parrot, so other code generation possibilities exist.

Early Integration

We've started moving subsystems over to M0. The order of which systems hasn't been determined yet, but producing a complete list and making sure we're aware of the dependencies will prove important.

C/6model in Core

Having a solid implementation of 6model in core will eventually be a blocker. Implementing our current object semantics in M0, only to switch to 6model later isn't a wise use of our hackers' tuits.

Pervasive Integration

At this point, everyone can jump in. We have a couple major subsystems converted and have worked most of the kinks out of the process of translating C into M0. We'll be converting every subsystem that we can find to M0 and will have plenty of example code and documentation to lower the barrier to entry.

Complete Integration

Parrot has a fairly small core of C code consisting of little more than the M0 VM and the GC.


Committing to a timeline can be tricky. It's much more important to have an M0 that's thoroughly well thought-out than one that's usable by a certain date. That said, the M0 spec and prototype are coming along nicely. Completing the "Noop Integration" stage and possibly getting a solid Mole compiler by the 3.9 release are reasonable goals, depending on how many interested parties make themselves known. I'm happy to see that whiteknight has made C/6model one of his roadmap goals. C/6Model in Core is largely orthogonal to M0 except that it needs to be integrated and solid before we start translating Parrot's object-related C code into Mole.