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BrowserUk
<blockquote><i>What is the "other contender" other than C? </i></blockquote>
<p>Given it's immaturity and the learning curve it has, it wasn't a contender when Parrot was started, but I think that with the advent of a GCC backend running on Linux, [http://www.digitalmars.com/d/index.html|Digital Mars D], shows considerable promise for future cross-platform projects.
<p>It has everything you need from C, low-level access to the hardware including inline assembler support, fast optimising compiler etc. It also has built-in memory management & garbage collection, objects, strings, hashes, types, contracts, templates, mixins, etc. etc. and can link directly to C code without requiring "wrappers". Or, all the good bits from C++ without the anachronisms or complexity.
<blockquote><i>I was wondering ... that maybe it could be bootstrapped as the parser and emit Parrot code</i></blockquote>
<p>From what I've seen and understood, it almost certainly could produce Parrot code directly. The only downside of that is the 40 MB download of GHC.
<p>Then again, if it gets competent enough that it could be used to write the P6 compiler in P6, you could end up with it generating a P6 compiler that could compile itself?. Such things have been done before.
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