What language do you think would be best for them/someone to move to Parrot as their base platform?
Given Parrot's very dynamic nature, a dynamic language seems like a good idea. Io would be quite interesting but it's too esoteric at this point so perhaps a more popular prototype-based language like JavaScript? What about dumping the old, crappy C-based implementation of Ruby for Parrot?
Actually, JavaScript would be kind of interesting as a First-among-equals language. The more I work with JS, the more I get the feeling that it's a wonderful language crippled by a tragic standard library and a horrible run time.
JavaScript has some great runtimes; V8 and Tracemonkey are very fast. The standard library is also fine, you probably only dislike the W3C DOM. Pretty much everyone agrees that that is one of the worst APIs ever designed, and that's why it's been replaced (or rather, hidden) by things like jQuery.
There is already an implementation of Ruby on Parrot called "Cardinal". Don't know its status but it can now be found in GitHub http://github.com/cardinal
I haven't worked on Cardinal in ages, besides moving it to an independent repository recently and updating it to actually build on its own last night.
The grammar is fairly complete, but the standard library isn't there, several builtin classes are missing completely, or don't have all their methods filled out, etc.
I was targeting 1.9, yes.
The big problem is that I don't actually know or really like ruby. That's the main reason I stopped working on it.
I'd love to see someone else take up work on it. I'd be glad to give commit privs on the repo to anyone, and I'd love to help anyone get up to speed in working on it.
Given Parrot's very dynamic nature, a dynamic language seems like a good idea. Io would be quite interesting but it's too esoteric at this point so perhaps a more popular prototype-based language like JavaScript? What about dumping the old, crappy C-based implementation of Ruby for Parrot?