Earlier today at YAPC::EU, jnthn mentioned a number of features and needs that would be especially helpful to Rakudo. I though I ought to relay those items. They are as follows.
1) Threading - this isn't a pressing concern right now, but we'll need to something about it in the near future. nine, (a.k.a. Stefan Seifert) dropped by #parrot and is apparently here at yapc. I'll try to find him. From what I've heard he's interested in helping Rakudo's threading, which means whipping Parrot's threading into shape. In the event that he's interested, I'd like to ask for a mentor to guide him through Parrot's guts and help him get working quickly. Ideally this would be someone who's looked at the threading code and has some familiarity with the existing code. 2) Asynchronous I/O - This also isn't urgent, but will become increasingly important. People have come to Rakudo and said that they'd start hacking on web apps once A I/O was implemented. We need to figure out what primitives we need to provide to HLLs, then provide them. 3) sub cloning - (This is primarily a memory usage change, not a speed improvement.) Perl 6 is a very closure-heavy language. Our sub cloning code copies a lot of data that doesn't actually vary between sub. Someone (possibly me) needs to dig into this, do some profiling and figure out the best way to avoid cloning the bits that don't change. 4) PCC - while Rakudo uses a custom binder, nqp doesn't and is sensitive to the speed of Parrot's non-:call_sig calling conventions. Profiling, refactoring and general performance improvements would make Rakudo happier by speeding up their build. Additionally, we need to be sure that :call_sig is as fast as we can make it. I suspect that it is, but verifying this would be helpful. 5) invocation - Separate from PCC itself, we need to profile and optimize sub invocation. I've been having a great time at yapc, especially seeing some of the really cool stuff being done on top of Rakudo. Parrot has a great opportunity to improve Rakudo's foundation, and by doing so to advance what people expect of dynamic languages. I'm excited by the opportunity and hope we'll be up to the task. Thanks, Christoph _______________________________________________ http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
