This is Parrot, version 3.1.0

Parrot is Copyright (C) 2001-2011, Parrot Foundation.

LICENSE INFORMATION

This code is distributed under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0. For more details, see the full text of the license in the file LICENSE.

OVERVIEW

Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for dynamic languages.

PREREQUISITES

You need a C compiler, a linker, and a make program of course.

If you will be linking with the ICU library you have to download and install it before configuring Parrot. Get it from http://site.icu-project.org/download

You also need Perl 5.8.4 or newer, and Storable 2.12 or newer for running various configure and build scripts.

For most of the platforms that we are supporting initially, Parrot should build out of the box. docs/parrot.pod lists the core platforms. PLATFORMS provides reports on the platforms on which Parrot has been built and tested.

HOW TO GET PARROT FROM GITHUB

I. Install Git.

Linux: The method depends on your distribution. To install you should execute (as root or sudo ):

On Ubuntu/Debian (apt-based):

apt-get install git-core

On Red Hat, Fedora (rpm-based):

yum install git

on Gentoo (portage):

emerge -av dev-vcs/git

Windows: There are 2 Git ports on Windows:

msysgit http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/downloads/list TortoiseGit http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/downloads/list

Macintosh OS X:

An Internet search will locate a variety of git installers for Mac OS X, including this:

http://help.github.com/mac-git-installation/

II. Obtaining Parrot from github.com

To get a copy of the Parrot Git repository:

git clone git://github.com/parrot/parrot.git

This will checkout the master branch by default. To create a local branch that tracks the branch "some_branch":

git checkout -b --track some_branch origin/some_branch

All the above URLs are read-only. If you are a Parrot core developer, then use the read-write URL:

git clone [email protected]:parrot/parrot.git

You can view the list of branches at http://github.com/parrot/parrot

INSTRUCTIONS

For now, unpack your Parrot tarball, (if you're reading this, you've probably already done that) and type

perl Configure.pl

to run the Configure script. The Configure.pl script extracts configuration from the running perl5 program. You may need to explicitly tell Configure.pl which compiler and linker to use. For example, to compile C files with 'cc', C++ files with 'CC', and link everything together with 'CC', you would type

perl Configure.pl --cc=cc --link=CC --ld=CC

See "perl Configure.pl --help" for more options and docs/configuration.pod for more details.

For systems like HPUX that don't have inet_pton please run

perl Configure.pl --define=inet_aton

Running Configure.pl will generate a config.h header, a Parrot::Config module, platform files and many Makefiles.

The file "myconfig" has an overview of configure settings.

Next, run make. (Configure.pl will tell you which version of make it recommends for your system.)

Now, the interpreter should build. If you are building the ICU library (this is the default on most systems), you need to use GNU make instead (or something compatible with it).

You can test Parrot by running "make test". You can run the tests in parallel with "make TEST_JOBS=3 test".

You can run the full test suite with

make fulltest

Note: PLATFORMS contains notes about whether test failures are expected on your system.

You can install Parrot with:

make install

By default, this installs in /usr/local, with the Parrot executable in /usr/local/bin. If you want to install Parrot into another location use:

perl Configure.pl --prefix=/home/joe/bird
make install

But please note that dynamic libs will not be found for non-standard locations unless you set LD_LIBRARY_PATH or similar.

Look at docs/parrot.pod and docs/intro.pod for where to go from here. If you have any problems, see the section "How To Submit A Bug Report" in docs/submissions.pod. These documents are in POD format. You can view these files with the command:

perldoc -F docs/intro.pod

CHANGES

For documentation on the user-visible changes between this version and previous versions, please see NEWS.

MAILING LISTS

The Parrot user mailing list is [email protected]. Subscribe by filling out the form at http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-users . The list is archived at http://lists.parrot.org/pipermail/parrot-users/ .

For development discussions see the information in docs/gettingstarted.pod.

FEEDBACK, PATCHES, etc.

See docs/submissions.pod for more information on reporting bugs and submitting patches.

WEB SITES

The following web sites have all the information you need about Parrot: http://www.parrot.org/ http://trac.parrot.org/ http://docs.parrot.org/

Have fun, The Parrot Team.