Git is a free & open source, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Every Git clone is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server.  Branching and merging are fast and easy to do.

Git is used for version control of files, much like tools such as Mercurial, Bazaar, Subversion, CVS, Perforce, and Visual SourceSafe.

- Git

I quickly learned how to use git locally by reading the online manual and researching the available command line options.  Just to save you some time on finding git clients, I use gitosx on Mac, and msysgit on Windows.  While I started using Git for all of my new projects (creating new repositories), importing repositories from SVN seems to be pretty painless.  Although I now only use Git through the command line, there are many Git GUIs available for free and pay.  After having used Git for a while, I felt comfortable enought with Git to publish my code online, but I did not know if there was a Google Code equivalent for Git.

After a little searching, I found GitHub, which is one of many websites that host Git repositories.  Having followed the instructions on how to setup SSH access to GitHub, I pushed all of my repositories online.  The process was pretty simple and allows everybody to quickly and easily fork copies for their own private use.

Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for dynamic languages. Parrot currently hosts a variety of language implementations in various stages of completion, including Tcl, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Scheme, PHP, Python, Perl 6, APL, and a .NET bytecode translator. Parrot is not about parrots, though we are rather fond of them for obvious reasons.

Looking into why this isn’t in use, I wasn’t able to find much.  My guess is that it looks like each interpreter needs to be re-implemented for the Parrot VM.  Which means none of the implementations on the Parrot VM are actually mature.  I’m looking forward to when Parrot VM is widely accepted by hosts and the development community as a whole.  I’m beginning to work how extensions developed for each interpreter can be used (if at all) in the Parrot VM.