Parrot Compiler

I posed the question of what the importance of the Parrot Compiler groovy is (ELI5) on the groovy slack channel http://groovy-community.slack.com.
And got an answer direct from Guillaume Laforge

the syntax of Groovy hasn’t evolved in a long time

the current / old parser is a bit complicated to evolve

and is using a very old version of the parsing library

so any change we’d want to make to the language (a new operator, for example) becomes very complicated

So we’ve been wanting to upgrade the underlying parser library for a while, but since the library evolved a lot, that also required a rewrite of the grammar of the language

But there’s another thing to consider

Groovy’s always been adopted by Java developers easily because of how close to the Java syntax it’s always been

so most Java programs are also valid Groovy programs

it’s been important to Groovy’s success to have this source compatibility

Java 8's been out for a while already

and we’ve been asked countless times if we’d support this or that particular syntax enhancement from Java 8

for “copy’n paste compatibility”, if you will

We decided to upgrade to a newer version of our parsing library (from v2 to v4 of Antlr)

to allow Groovy’s syntax to continue to evolve

to also support new operators and things like that

but to also support Java 8 constructs, for continued compatibility

And that’s about it :slightly_smiling_face:

Would a 5yo understand my explanation?