What's the benefit of Parrot VM for end-users?

Question

What's the benefit of the Parrot Virtual Machine for end-users (software developers)?

For example, if I could program against Perl or Python directly why would I bother programming for them under Parrot?

Answer 1

Basically, the typical benefits of a VM (portability, runtime optimizations, etc.). From the main page:

Once a program has been compiled to run on a virtual machine, it will run on any platform that the VM has been implemented on.

Parrot is just different from typical VM in that it's designed to support any existing language, not just an specific language. So, when Parrot improves, every supported language does improve.