Parrot is a virtual machine like no other. Targeting dynamic languages like PHP, Python, Ruby, and Perl, it incorporates an object-oriented assembly language, is register-based rather than stack-based, and employs continuations as the core means of flow control. It hosts a powerful suite of compiler tools tailored to dynamic languages and a next generation regular expression engine. This talk briefly explains the overall architecture of Parrot and teaches the skills needed to get started hacking in Parrot.

Allison Randal is chief architect and lead developer of the open source project Parrot, and chair of O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON).
In over 25 years as a programmer, she has developed everything from games to linguistic analysis tools, e-commerce websites, shipping fulfillment, compilers, and database replication systems, worked as a language designer, project manager, conference organizer, editor, and consultant, been president of an open source software foundation, written two books, and founded a tech publishing company.