This Week in Perl 6, July 13-19, 2005
by Piers CawleyJuly 21, 2005
Welcome to another Perl 6 summary, brought to you by the words "displacement" and "activity." So far today, I've caught up with everything unread in NetNewsWire, my Flickr groups, every other mailing list I'm subscribed to, and completed about five Sudoku. Now I'm dragging out this introduction and I don't know why; I enjoy writing these things.
This Week in perl6-compiler
This was another quiet week on the list. However, you only have to watch the SVN commit log and the other stuff on PlanetSix to know that things are still proceeding apace. Last time I looked, it seemed that Stevan Little was working on bootstrapping the Perl 5 implementation of the Perl 6 MetaModel to implement it in terms of itself.
Rather mind-bogglingly, Pugs is now targeting JavaScript as well.
The current Pugs release is 6.2.8.
Creating
Threads in BEGIN
Nicholas Clark posted what he described as a "note to collective self"
wondering about how Perl 6 will cope with people creating threads inside of
BEGIN blocks. According to Luke, "it won't." Larry thought that it
might be okay to create threads at CHECK time, so long as any
spawned threads didn't do any real work later than CHECK time.
Perl 6 Modules
Gav... (I presume the ellipsis is important to someone) wondered what he needed to do to write Perl 6 modules. Nathan Gray pointed him at the porting how-to in the Pugs distribution.
Is Namespace Qualification Really Required?
Phil Crow came across some weirdness with namespace resolution. It seems that you have to qualify function names explicitly in signatures. Autrijus agreed that it was a bug and asked for Phil to write a TODO test. Discussion ensued--I think the fix is in SVN now.
Parsing Perl 6 Grammars
Nathan Gray wondered about the state of Jeff "Japhy" Pinyan's effort to implement a Perl 6 rules parser. Japhy said that it's been on hold for a while, but that he'd started to work on it again, basing it on his earlier Regexp::Parser module.
Meanwhile, in perl6-internals
PMC Changes?
Nicholas Clark wondered if the PMC layout is likely to remain stable, or if there might be changes in relation to the generational garbage collector. In particular, he wanted to know if the API would remain stable. Leo thought that there might be changes in the layout, but the API shouldn't change.
ParTcl Accelerator
Will Coleda showed some timings for ParTcl, the Parrot implementation of Tcl, and made a few suggestions about how to get things going faster. Patrick and Leo mused on the issues involved.
Partitioning PMCs
Nicholas Clark had some questions about making PMCs and Ponie play well
together, with particular reference to using SvFLAGS().
Embedding/Extending Interface
Nicholas Clark wondered if Chromatic was still waiting for confirmation that his automated embedding tools were the Right Thing. Apparently, Chromatic is waiting for confirmation, but offered to send his existing patch, if only to force the discussion.
Ponie Questions
Nicholas Clark had a bunch of questions about various subsystems, mostly in relation to Ponie. Leo came good with answers.
Parrot Project Management
I'm not sure if Will Coleda's suffering culture shock about the way Parrot project management happens, or if we're really not doing it right. The first rule of Parrot/Perl 6 development is that if you really want something, then the only way to guarantee that it gets done is to do it yourself. It's certainly worked for me over the years.
Tcl GC Issues--Solved
Matt Diephouse announced that as of r8617 in SVN, the longstanding GC bug that ParTcl occasionally tickled has been fixed. There was no rejoicing on the list, but at least one summarizer was really pleased to hear it.
GMC for Dummies
Summer of Code intern Alexandre Buisse, who is working on a new GC system for Parrot, pointed us all at an introduction to the Generational Mark and Compact scheme that he's working to implement. He and Leo had a discussion about implications, assumptions, and other stuff.
Bob Rogers asked some tricky questions relating to circular structures and timely destruction. Discussion of this continues.
Register Allocation Fun
There was a flurry of patches from Curtis Rawls, who appears to be working on refactoring and (one hopes) fixing the IMCC register allocator. Way to go, Curtis.
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