This Week in Perl 6, July 20-26, 2005
by Matt FowlesJuly 28, 2005
Welcome to another Perl 6 summary, brought to you by microwaved Chinese food and air conditioning. I love the modern era. Without further ado, I bring you:
Perl 6 Compilers
PxPerl
Grégoire Péan announced the release of PxPerl 5.8.7-3, allowing easy access for people who want to play with Pugs and Parrot on Windows.
Test Report for Windows
Ronald Hill reported some failing tests for Pugs on Windows. Fortunately, given Pugs' development, there is a reasonable chance of having these problems fixed. Unfortunately, given Pugs' development, no such information made it to the list.
Parsing Perl 6 Rules
Nathan Gray wondered how Jeff Pinyan's parsing-Perl-6-rules project was going. Jeff said that it did not get very far, but he posted what he did have to his feather site.
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Related Reading 
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Pugs Problems
Vadim Konovalov found two problems while playing with slurp.
Adriano Ferreira showed him how to work around slurp not accepting
a :raw option. Nobody commented on the peculiar
$*ARGS[0] value when the argument is
-foobarfluffy.
Official Perl 6 Rules Grammar
Patrick announced an "official Perl 6 grammar," which he will maintain closely with PGE in Parrot. It is incomplete at this point, but patches are most welcome.
PIL Nodes Descriptions
Allison Randal posted a request for a clue batting, listing various types of nodes in PIL and explaining her guesses at their descriptions. Stuart Cook and Patrick both provided a little help, although they did not address everything on her list.
Perl 6 FAQ Patch
Autrijus provided a patch for the Perl 6 FAQ to remove an outdated question. Robert Spier applied the patch (modulo some confusion about staged versus live copies).
Parrot
Opcode Optimizability
Curtis Rawls noted that it is often simpler from an optimizer writer's
standpoint to do constant folding and optimization on a smaller set of opcodes
(just one variant of add instead of five (seven, if you count
inc and dec)). Leo explained that removing these
opcodes isn't an option, but suggest to add to the FAQ the recommendation for
compiler writers to emit only the more verbose codes.
Refcounting Hash
Nicholas Clark wants to use a hash to hold reference counts for Ponie
(something like dod_register_pmc in pmc.c), but he
doesn't want to duplicate code. Leo suggested that he move some of the code
into a PMC and then switch the real registry to use that PMC.
New PGE Test
Mitchell N. Charity submitted a test for a "large" Pugs grammar. It currently fails. Patrick noted that the test likely came from rx_grammar.pl in the Pugs distribution. This probably led to his above addition of an "Official Perl 6 Rules Grammar."
JIT Emit Help
Adam Preble decided that he would play with an x86_64 code generator. Unfortunately, he hit some stumbling blocks. Leo offered to help him and provided pointers from #parrot.
Call Opcode Cleanup
Leo wants to clean up some of the various invoke opcodes. He
posted a request for comment, but Warnock applies. It seems that Leo's requests
for comments like this get Warnocked a lot.
spawnw
Return Value
Prompted by Jonathan Worthington submitting a patch to make
the spawnw tests pass on Windows (applied), Jerry Gay opened a
TODO ticket for switching spawnw to return something object-like
to wrap platform-specific oddities.
Bugs in ops2vim.pl
Amir Karger noticed a bug in ops2vim.pl and suggested a fix. Jerry Gay fixed it.
Leo's Ctx Branch Tests
Jerry Gay and Leo worked together to get his branch passing a few more tests on Windows. Nick Glencross wondered if the Python dynclasses tests were running, too. Jonathan Worthington explained that they were being skipped for the moment.
Raised by the Aliens
Matt Diephouse was surprised to discover that you cannot use
addparent with a PMC for either argument. He suggested that either should work or should have official documentation.
