After almost a whole night of mucking around, I finally got Parrot up and running. My basic problem stemmed from the ICU part of Parrot not working on Win32. A quick scan of perl.perl6.internals shows that I'm not the only one with ICU and building issues. But none of the solutions outlined there worked for me.I still haven't been able to build the test suite - but hey, I have a working parrot.exe :)
The problem is that Parrot has hardcoded support for building using VS 6 which barfs on VS.NET. And the building is very fragile when you use ICU from some other source.
Here's what I did to finally get it to run
1. Download the Parrot code from CVS.Put it in D:/parrot
2. Download the latest ICU source code (not the binaries) from http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/download/2.8/index.html.
3. Extract it into some folder (D:/icu, for e.g). Open up the .sln file in the 'allinone' directory and do a release build.
4.Copy the contents of D:/icu/source/data/out to D:/parrot/blib. Dont ask me why - just do it :)
5.Go to the parrot folder and run config like this
perl Configure.pl --icushared="D:\cu\lib\icudata.lib D:\icu\lib\icuuc.lib" --icuheaders="D:\icu\include" --icudatadir="D:\parrot\blib\lib"
6.Run 'nmake' followed by 'nmake test' and then 'nmake install'. The 'nmake test' part failed for me with a linking error (about some nci_dlvar_vv being undefined). But the good thing is- if all goes well, you should have a partially working parrot.exe in your parrot folder.
[Update: After removing nci_dlvar_vv from libnci_test.def, I was able to run the tests.All dynclass and nci tests failed though]
If anyone knows how to get this to work properly, do get in touch with me. I've already posted a question on the mailing list but haven't got a response yet.