This Week on Perl 6, Fortnight Ending 2004-06-06

Jun 9, 2004 by Piers Cawley

Whee! There’s a new graphics card in the G5, which means I can type this at the big screen again, which makes me happy. Well, it would make me far happier if the new card didn’t leave horrible artifacts all over the screen like some kind of incontinent puppy attempting to fulfil OpenGL draw instructions. Maybe next week will see a third card in the box.

Dang! It looks like the G5 will be off receiving some TLC from an Apple service centre while I’m on holiday next week. Which means that the ‘weekly’ summaries will continue on their fortnightly summer holiday schedule for at least one more summary. But then the lists themselves appear to be on summer footing anyway.

Ahem.

As you will probably have worked out by now, we start with perl6-internals.

Library loading

Jens Rieks is working on library loading code that does all the nice things we’ve come to expect from other languages. The plan being that you’ll be able to write (say)

    use('some_library')

and Parrot will go off and search it’s include paths for some_library.(pbc|imc|pasm|whatever) and load it. As he noted, if you’re going to implement that kind of code in parrot assembler (or PIR, or whatever), you need some way of loading the loading code. It’s also a good idea to have a working stat. Jens added a Parrot_load_bytecode_direct function to the parrot core to support the first part. His please for a functional (if not complete) stat were answered by Dan who set about implementing the stat API he outlined a few weeks ago.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200405211333.22233.parrot@jensbeimsurfen.de

Embedding Parrot

Leo Tötsch and chromatic answered Paul Querna’s questions from last week about embedding Parrot.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200405241043.i4OAh7a01618@thu8.leo.home

Using PMCs as PerlHash keys

TOGoS wanted to know how he could use a PMC as a key in a PerlHash. Leo replied that it was as simple as doing

    $P2 = new Key
    $P2 = "key_string"
    $P0 = $P1[$P2]

Piers Cawley did some naive translation into PASM and got himself horribly confused. Leo and TOGoS corrected him.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040520190352.46387.qmail@web41410.mail.yahoo.com

First draft of IO and event design

Remarking that events and IO are “(kinda, sorta)” the same thing, Dan posted his first draft of a unified IO and events design and asked for comments. This being p6i, he got several (though not as many as usual, maybe everyone likes it).

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=a0611040abcd7faf9492e@%5B10.0.1.3%5D

Freeze, objects, crash, boom

Will Coleda tried to get freezing and objects to play well together and failed. So he asked a bunch of questions. Leo didn’t solve the problem, but he did have some pointers to where it was coming from.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=40B4D76B.5060306@coleda.com

MMD table setup semantics

Possibly winning an award for the oldest rejuvenated thread, Nicholas Clark had some questions about a post Dan made about MMD at the end of April. He made a suggesting about how to calculate ‘distance’ for multi dispatch. Dan pointed out that Larry had decreed that the ‘distance’ would be the ‘Manhattan Distance’. (Google has several definitions).

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040527143518.GD1129@plum.flirble.org

Compiler FAQ entry

Will Coleda posted a possible set of entries for the compiler writers’ FAQ. Leo had a few quibbles. Sterling Hughes suggested that having small, runnable source code examples would be really helpful.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=40B7ECCF.6030205@coleda.com

Layering PMCs

Dan kicked off a discussion on how to go about layering PMCs. The usual suspects offered suggestions. The aim is to be able to layer behaviours on top of PMCs without massive overhead or combinatorial explosion problems. As usual with these things, there’s several possible ways of doing it, the debate is about choosing the best one.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=a06110404bcde7bf18ebd@%5B172.24.18.98%5D

IO Layers

Leo had some questions about the (not fully implemented) ParrotIOLayerAPI. He laid out a proposal for implementing things. Uri Guttman and Dan joined in a discussion of the issues. (Simple summary of the issues: Asynchronous IO is hard. Possibly more accurate summary of the issues: Asynchronous IO is *not* synchronous)

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=40B71F53.8000001@toetsch.at

PIO_unix_pipe()

Leo’s implemented a PIO_unix_pipe() method which allows you to run an external program and capture the results with a Parrot IO handle. He doctored the open opcode to use it

    pipe = open "/bin/ls -l", "-|" 

Dan liked it, but proposed also adding a backtick operator.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=40C1C64D.5080105@toetsch.at

Register spilling

Dan noted that it’s possible to get the register allocator caught up in an infinite loop (or as near infinite as makes no difference) as it tries to work out a register spilling strategy. He proposed there be a ‘slow but working’ fallback method to use if the normal method goes through too many iterations. Leo suggested an delightfully brute force approach with some possible elaborations that Dan didn’t think would be that useful in the cases he was seeing.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.9-29837-88076.5.39698439413385@perl.org

Stat

Dan implemented a simple stat function that should be enough for Jens Rieks to get a library path based loading system to work. Leo patched his first attempt and most things in the garden were lovely (with a couple of rather less pretty spots that are being worked on as I type).

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=a06110401bcd836c94dd7@%5B172.24.18.98%5D

Bit ops on strings

Argh! The character encoding discussion! Run away!

Nicholas Clark and Dan discussed Parrots Unicode handling.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040525113008.GC1129@plum.flirble.org

Standard Library behaviour

Dan commented that now Jens was working the architecture of the standard library, the time had come to discuss how things should work. He outlined the options, asked for comments, and got promptly Warnocked.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=a06110407bcd924533939@%5B10.0.1.3%5D

Meanwhile, in perl6-language

The Periodic Table of the Operators

Mark Lentczner announced that he’d put together a periodic table of Perl 6 operators. Everyone liked it, though several amendments were proposed and made. Check it out, it’s very lovely (and anyone who references the great Edward Tufte in his explanation of the design is likely to be all right in my book).

There will be T-shirts.

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=486B658A-AF64-11D8-8F60-000393A56BB6@glyphic.com

http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/blog/code/PeriodicTable.html

Announcements, Apologies, Acknowledgements

Ah well, if you can’t beat the system, roll with it and pretend it’s deliberate. Next week’s summary definitely won’t be next week, but there will be another fortnightly summary covering the fortnight ending 2004-06-20. And the next summary will almost certainly be on a fortnightly schedule too, unless BT work some miracle and sort out my ADSL transfer promptly.

If you find these summaries useful or enjoyable, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl. You might also like to send me feedback at mailto:pdcawley@bofh.org.uk

http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ – The Perl Foundation

http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ – Perl 6 Development site