This Week in Perl 6, April 26 - May 3, 2005
by Matt FowlesMay 05, 2005
Welcome to another week's summary. This week I shall endeavor not to delete my summary accidentally or destroy the world. Here we go with p6c.
Perl 6 Compilers
Implicit
$_ on for Loops
Kiran Kumar found a bug in Pugs involving for loops which use
$_ but don't iterate over it. Aaron Sherman and Luke Palmer
confirmed the bug. There's no word as to its final status, but given the rate
of development of Pugs...
Pugs Darcs Trouble
Glenn Ehrlich noticed that Pugs' Darcs repository wasn't updating. Sam Vilain explained that occasionally a daemon needed kicking.
Memory Game v0.2
BÁRTHÁZI András announced the release of the latest version of Memory. He also put out a call for 85x75 pixel photos for the next version.
Haddock for Pugs
Stuart Cook decided that the easiest way for him to understand Pugs internals was to provide better documentation. To that end he started working with Haddock to automatically generate cross-linked documentation for Pugs. He even met with some success.
is
export Trait
Garrett Rooney wondered why the is export trait appeared to do
nothing in Pugs. Stevan Little explained that it was just a place holder which,
though it parses, does nothing semantically yet.
Pugs 6.2.2
Autrijus proudly announced the release of Pugs 6.2.2. It features many, many changes. High on the list is a bunch of speed ups, and also thread-safe, deadlock-free internal storage.
Pugs on Cygwin
Rob Kinyon noticed that Pugs had trouble on Cygwin. He has made some headway rectifying the situation, although work remains to be done.
Pugs TODO Model
Stevan has put some more thought into the TODO model for Pugs. His latest suggestion, annotating TODO tests with a flag indicating why they are not passing, seems a little less hackish then the last one and received general support.
Parrot Hiding Inside Pugs
Autrijus wanted to embed the newly released PGE, which is PIR code that runs on Parrot. He decided to embed Parrot into Pugs. He also posted an interesting link to JHC as a possible bootstrap solution.
New PGE Released
Maybe I should have mentioned this first. Patrick R. Michaud released a new version of the Parrot Grammar Engine. It is entirely PIR code and generates PIR code. It has many features but not enough tests... <cough>hint</cough>.
Parrot
Monthly Release?
Jared Rhine wondered if the monthly releases included April. Chip announced that April's release would be slushier then most, but would start on the fourth.
t/op/debuginfo.t Failure
François Perrad noticed a failure in debuginfo. Leo
pointed out that it was an issue of flushing output handles. Francois provided
a patch (well, actually two patches). Warnock applies to the second.
ParTcl Happy?
Will Coleda thought that ParTcl's GC bugs had finally gone away. Leo burst his bubble. Apparently these GC bugs can disappear and reappear according to sunspot activity.
S1zzegfault
in load_bytecode
Nick Glencross submitted a patch fixing a segfault in
load_bytecode. Jens pointed out that it should use
real_exception instead of internal_exception.
chromatic offered to write the test. There is no official committed message
though.
Large
PackFile Tinker
Leo implemented a change in the interpreter PackFile structure
which has been under discussion for a long time. Unfortunately, it has the
potential to break a lot of JIT stuff. Tests and fixes would be wonderful.
PMC Inheritance Issue
Nicholas Clark had some trouble with his Perl5 PMCs. Later, he posted a "mea culpa" email, but Leo provided some useful pointers anyway.
RT Cleanup
Bernhard Schmalhofer cleaned out an old ticket from RT.
RFC
assign Px, Py
Some time ago, Leo requested comments on the semantics of assign. Brent
"Dax" Royal-Gordon tried to de-Warnock the thread with his support. He also
suggested a clone operator.
NULL
in real_exception
Nicholas Clark struggled with a NULL pointer deref in
real_exception. Leo pointed him toward the correct approach.
Unary Operator Overhaul
Having finished overhauling the infix operators, Leo set to work updating the unary operators to provide variants which allocate their results.
Die
die, die!
Leo announced that he was removing the die opcode and adding a
Bruce Willis opcode in its place. Unlike Mr. Willis, the die_hard
opcode actually died relatively easily. Leo then renamed it to
just die out of popular demand.
Core Dump with Computed goto Core
Nick Glencross found a core dump with the computed goto core. Leo explained that a hackish attempted optimization caused it. He also fixed it.
Ignore Generated Files in SVN
Juergen Boemmels made SVN ignore some .so files. Leo asked if it could also ignore .rej and .orig files.
DYNSUPER
Issues
Nicholas Clark found that DYNSUPER did not work well with his
dynamic classes. Leo provided a suggestion for something to try and also
suggested a super vtable call.
MMD Type Info
Autrijus wondered how Parrot carries around the type info for MMD. Leo provided answers.
IMC HTTP Server
Markus Amslser wrote a tiny webserver in IMC. This led to the discovery of that the binary to ASCII transcoding is missing. Leo suggested several possible solutions.
Ponie's Use of PMC Flag Bits
Nicholas Clark asked how best to use the 8 private bits of PMC in Ponie. His initial thought was to mark type with it. Leo suggested that adding the type to the flag bits was unnecessary, as one can usually just call a vtable or MMD function directly and the type will work out.
Built-in MMDs as Methods
Leo added support for calling built-in MMDs on objects as methods.
Unary and Infix Ops Update
Leo posted a summary and TODO for his overhaul of opcodes that return new results. Jerry Gay and Bob Rogers helped fill out the corners. Bob even provided some tests.
Parrot and Ref Counting
Robin Redeker wondered why Parrot had decided to go with a non-ref counting GC. Dan Sugalski took responsibility for the decision and explained his motivations. Non-ref counting GCs are essentially simpler, cleaner, and faster. You can get a more detailed answer from reading the thread or Dan's Squawks of the Parrot: What the heck is: Garbage Collection from way back when.
Deprecate
fast_call?
Leo mused that he would like to deprecate the fast_call PIR
construct. No one squawked, so I call it officially deprecated.
Win32 Thread Primitives
Vladimir Lipsky and Leo went back and forth a few times working out thread primitives for Windows. I am not sure what state they finally reached.
Call Syntax Abstraction
Leo posted a proposal for a calling convention abstraction. No comments have appeared yet, but it has not been up for long.
Tailcalls in PIR
Patrick R. Michaud wondered if PIR supported tailcalls and tailmethods yet. Leo provided a few pointers. Bob Rogers suggested a nice syntax, which Leo implemented.
Vtables in extend.h
Nicholas Clark noted a need for vtables in extend.h. Leo agreed that they should be auto-generated. chromatic eagerly requested the chance to write the Perl code that does this auto-generation.
s/BAILOUT/BAIL_OUT/
Michael G. Schwern announced that he'd removed BAILOUT from
Test::Builder in favor of BAIL_OUT. He admitted that a deprecated
BAILOUT would remain as undocumented. At some point we should
update.
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