I've been looking for something cool to do with Fantom, so I've decided to start working on getting Fantom running on Parrot.

I thought about LLVM, but the LL part kinda scared me off. Plus I hate C++ (though I love C). So Parrot it is.

I'm going to start writing an FCode to PIR translator. Should be lots of fun. I'll let you guys know when I have something rudimentary posted to bitbucket.

sounds awesome!

Now that I've dug into it a bit, I think I'm more interested in the internals of fantom itself rather than a VM port. I'm going to experiment a bit with things like invoke_dynamic and see where that leads.

It seems to me that if fantom were to actually embrace the JVM as opposed to CLR (or Parrot, or whatever), then there are an awful lot of java libraries like java.nio or java.util.concurrent that could have wrappers written for them in idiomatic fan.

awful lot of java libraries like java.nio or java.util.concurrent that could have wrappers written for them in idiomatic fan

I'm not sure anything is preventing that today; it should be pretty straightforward to create those APIs in a java-only pod using the native interfaces.

If I were into Fantom development, I would base my VM on libjit rather than on Parrot. Besides, libjit is ways more liberal than CLR's VES for the number of features it allows to implement. LLVM is a monster, all the more if you are not a fan of macros, templates and other kludges.

Yeah, but LLVM allows portability to iPhone if I'm not mistaken.

Sure, but it's jitter is slow as molasses, not to talk about the compiler.