I blame Joe. He got me thinking about Parrot, and he actually started submitting patches:
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=46681
That got me downloading the source, and I started looking at how the threading works under Win32. It's virtually unimplemented. Was also looking at how Parrot handles some of the underlying OS functions compared to Perl5 (things like win32/VMem.h nad win32/win32.c in Perl5). Again, looks like a target rich environment.
There's plenty of work to be done there. Will hopefully get some cycles to start pushing some patches on low-hanging fruit.
On the upside, it looks like Parrot is targeted to not support Win9X, which is fantastic since that is where alot of the nasty code is in Perl5. If they target NT based platforms exclusively, the code ends up being MUCH cleaner. Think native UNICODE support [not having to vary between FooA() and FooW() functions]. Think not having to worry about whether Winsock is present.
Looks like alot of fun....
