The Parrot Design Documents give pretty good overviews of the major features of Parrot. Most of them have a series of links to papers and other documentation that serve as good references.

Thanks for your reply!
But I'm still a little hesitated. I mean, before I read Parrot Design documents, or even hack parrot , would I need to study some computer courses such as compiler design, computer system?

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I am trying to improve my English skills, if you see a mistake please feel free to reply or /msg me a correction

I'd like to say "No, you don't" because my degree is in music and I've taken two classes on computers in my life, one on programming the Apple ][ in 1984 or 1985 and the other on typing in 1991. If you're self-motivated, it's pretty easy to pick up the details as you go along.

Of course, it does help to know how a virtual machine works. Learning by osmosis isn't terribly efficient, though it's likely you'll have to learn how Parrot works by osmosis even if you did have a background in compilers.

In my experience you can find helpful things to do without having studied CS or compiler design.

For example you could try to write a parrot backend for kp6. It now emits perl5 and common lisp, so you have templates on how the emitted code looks like in two other languages, and how the runtime works etc. Actually such a backend would be a good idea for a Perl 6 Micro Grant.

My impression is that kp6 is a non-CS project where you can understand the architecture easily without deeper compiler knowledge.

And if you don't want to write compilers, you can still help with the test suite, among other things. See Getting Involved with Perl 6 for more ideas.

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Perl 6 in German