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> I'd love to see a better separation of language and VMs. I think it's a bit sad that a language designer has to either implement their runtime system from scratch, or has to run it on top of a VM that was designed for another language (Java in the case of Jython).

Wasn't Perl 6's Parrot kind of meant to fulfil that role?

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> Wasn't Perl 6's Parrot kind of meant to fulfil that role?

Yes, that was an original project goal. You can see this as far back as Larry's State of the Onion 2003:

https://www.perl.com/pub/2003/07/16/soto2003.html/

... the "Parrot: Some Assembly Required" article written by Simon Cozens in September 2001:

https://www.perl.com/pub/2001/09/18/parrot.html/

... or, if you trust Git commits rather than articles which could have been edited in the meantime, the same article revised as introductory docs in the Parrot repository in December 2001:

https://github.com/parrot/parrot/blob/9bc8687beb5180e4cc8971...

I stand corrected.

I'd say not originally. But over time, as the Perl 6 project got delayed in the 2000's, it was decided that Parrot would be a runtime for all scripting languages. Which in turn meant it couldn't cater well enough for any. Which led to its demise.

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