This is a two-part talk. In the first part we'll sketch a broad outline of the architecture of Parrot, a virtual machine being designed to efficiently run the so-called dynamic languages. (Primarily Perl 5, Perl 6, Python, and Ruby) In the second part of the talk we'll cover some of the techniques and build tools we've developed as part of the process to abstract out the building and platform-specific optimizing of the VM source. (Somewhere between 75 and 80% of Parrot's source is preprocessed or autogenerated, some of it quite significantly)