Chapter 5. Parrot Internals

"What is the tortoise standing on?"

"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

—Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

This chapter details the architecture and internal workings of Parrot, the interpreter behind Perl 6. Parrot is a register-based, bytecode-driven, object-oriented, multithreaded, dynamically typed, self-modifying, asynchronous interpreter. While that's an awful lot of buzzwords, the design fits together remarkably well.