This week on Perl 6 (9/23 - 9/29, 2002)
by Piers CawleySeptember 29, 2002
Luckily, Leon Brocard has been volunteered to step into the breach and produce summaries for the next couple of weeks.
Oh yes, due to my being a lazy swine and not reading release notes, combined with a new version of Spamassassin no longer delivering mail by default (now it silently drops mail on the floor in cases where it had previously just delivered the mail), I may be missing some messages from this week. Sorry.
We'll kick off, as usual with happenings on the internal list:
Of Variables, Values and Vtables
Dan stopped travelling (for a while at least), and listed the current short term goals for Parrot. They are:
- Finish up the calling convention changes
- Spec the PMC changes
- Spec the vtable changes
- Get exceptions fully defined and a preliminary implementation
and promised the variable/vtable stuff in the 'next day or so', with the calling convention stuff a little earlier or later. Leo Toetsch offered some his thoughts on vtable methods for _keyed opcodes.
http://groups.google.com/groups
http://groups.google.com/groups
IMCC 0.0.9.2
Leopold Toetsch provided a patch which 'fixes all currently known problems [with respect to] IMCC/Perl6'. Andy Dougherty had some problems with the patch dumping core, possibly because of platform specific issues, and Steve Fink realised that there was an overlap between this patch and one he'd been working on. The patch has not yet been applied, but work continued.
http://rt.perl.org/rt2/Ticket/Display.html
Fun with intlists
Leopold Toetsch showed some benchmarks of intlist against PerlArrays, the difference is stunning. The intlist based test is some ten times faster than PerlArray, with most of PerlArray's time being spent allocating memory. Leo suggests using intlist as the PerlArray base class.
Having got bragging rights for one speed up, Leo sent in a second patch which gave another ten fold performance boost. Sean O'Rourke had a few questions about performance in typical usage and wondered if, we shouldn't look at using borrowing from SGI's STL implementation of a dequeue (double ended queue). Leo was ahead of him there; his second patch was already using the trick Sean had suggested.
http://groups.google.com/groups
http://groups.google.com/groups
Functions in Scheme
Jürgen Boumlmmels sent a pre patch which gets Scheme
functions working. It's built on top of an early version of Sean
O'Rourke's scratchpad.pmc, so be careful applying the initial
patch. Sean hoped that it would be be easy to reconcile Jürgen's
changes to the scratchpad pmc with the changes he'd made since he sent
Jürgen his early code. Jonathan Sillito asked why the scheme
interpreter maintained its own environment stack rather than use the
pad_stack. Apparently the current pad_stack is very closely tied to
Sub.pmc, which doesn't quite offer the semantics needed for scheme
functions. Also, the pad_stack makes it tricky to implement set!
and define correctly.
Dan chimed in asking everyone to hash out what they needed from scratchpads and lexical variables; once we have that nailed down it should be easy to get everything designed and implemented reasonably quickly, so Jürgen and Sean came up with a list between them.
http://groups.google.com/groups -- The patch
http://groups.google.com/groups -- Its description
Perl6 on HP-UX 11.00
H Merijn Brand was having trouble getting Perl 6 to work on HP-UX. It
was initially thought that this was a problem with the version of perl
he was using, but was eventually tracked down to a problem with make
test; the tests passed when Merijn did perl6 --test. However the
thread also covered making sure that the Perl6 build process rebuilt
the Grammar if appropriate. There's also a theory that there's a
problem with IMCC generating .pasm files.
Leopold Toetsch put his hand up for causing the problem, and submitted a patch to fix things. Applied.
http://groups.google.com/groups
http://groups.google.com/groups
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