Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20030713
Welcome once again to the Perl 6 Summary, in a week of major
developments and tantalizing hints.
Starting, as usual, with what's happening in perl6-internals
Targeting Parrot from GCC
Discussion in the thread entitled 'WxWindows Support / Interfacing
Libraries' centred on writing a Parrot backend to GCC. (No, I have no
idea what that has to do with the thread subject.) Tupshin Harper, Leo
Tötsch and Benjamin Goldberg discussed possibilities and potential
pit/pratfalls. At one point, Tupshin suggested emulating a 'more
traditional stack-oriented processor' and I don't think he was joking...
http://xrl.us/l6b
Timely destruction and "TRACE_SYSTEM_AREAS"
Jürgen Bömmels' rewrite of Parrot IO is causing some problems with the
garbage collection (IO handles are the canonical examples of resources
that need timely destruction).
Leo tracked down the source of resource leak to a problem with handles
being found on the C stack. Jürgen wasn't happy about this (he's not
keen on the stack walking approach to garbage collection). He proposed
that we get rid of the stack walk in favour of some other solution to
the infant mortality problem and offered a few candidates. Leo said that
he didn't like walking the C stack, going so far as to state that
"Timely destruction and solving infant mortality don't play together or
are mutually exclusive - in the current approach." Dan hasn't commented
on this yet.
http://xrl.us/l6c
Parrot is not feature frozen
There was a certain amount of confusion as some old email with the
subject 'Parrot is feature-frozen until Wednesday' made its way into a
small number of inboxes sowing confusion as it went. Suffice to say,
Parrot is not currently feature frozen, though Steve Fink did say that
he was considering a point release once the imcc/parrot integration was
complete. If Dan gets objects and exceptions finished, then it might
even warrant a 0.1.0 version number rather than 0.0.11
http://xrl.us/l6d
Perl* Abstraction
Luke Palmer has "finally" started to implement his Infinity PMC and has
noticed a lot of redundant code in the Perl* classes. He also noticed
that Parrot doesn't seem to have the distinction between container and
value that has been confusing people on the language list.
http://xrl.us/l6e
Fun with ParrotIO
First, Jürgen Bömmels sent in a patch to excise integer file descriptors
from Parrot except when they are managed via ParrotIO PMCs. Leo applied
this.
Clinton Pierce thought that this patch meant that a Win32 bug could be
closed in the Parrot bug database. This sparked a discussion with Leo,
and Jürgen, but I'm not entirely sure of the status of the bug...
http://xrl.us/l6f
http://xrl.us/l6g
Jako groks basic PMCs
Gregor N Purdy seems to have started working on Jako again, and checked
in some changes allowing Jako to manipulate PMCs. People agreed that
this was cool.
http://xrl.us/l6h
I want a Ponie!
The [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list was announced and I'll be
summarizing it as of next week when I've joined, caught up, and
generally recovered from America.
What's Ponie? Ponie is 'Perl On New Internal Architecture' or, as Thomas
Klausner put it, "A version of Perl 5 that will run on Parrot", which
was announced by Larry at his OSCON 'State of the Onion' address.
Discussion of Ponie on the perl6-internals list centred on the "What is
ponie?" question, with a certain amount of "Why ponie-dev, not
perl6-ponie?" thrown in for good measure.
Brian Ingerson announced that he'd set up a Ponie Wiki, Leon Brocard
pointed at the use.perl story announcing Ponie, and your summarizer
punted on writing a description of the project himself.
http://xrl.us/l6i
http://www.poniecode.org/ -- More on Ponie
http://ponie.kwiki.org/ -- Ingy's Ponie Wiki
http://xrl.us/lib -- use.perl announcement
Exceptions!
Leo Tötsch checked in the beginnings of an exceptions system. Then he
checked in the beginnings of an events system.
http://xrl.us/l6j
http://xrl.us/l6k
Meanwhile, in perl6-language
There were all of 6 messages, all of them discussing the effects of
aliasing an array slice.
http://xrl.us/l6l
Perl 6 Rules at OSCON
No, wait, that should be Perl6::Rules.
For his last talk at OSCON, Damian spoke about Perl6::Rules, his
implementation of Perl 6's rules system in pure Perl 5. And oh boy was
it tantalizing. He showed us something actually running a large chunk of
Perl 6 matching semantics, complete with handy debugging information,
diagnostic dumping and all the other useful stuff.
When we were all gagging for him to release it to CPAN immediately, he
told us that it wasn't finished yet; that he'd implemented it all during
the week of OSCON, in 700 lines of code; that he was going on holiday
for a month once he got home; and that the module would be completed and
released to CPAN as time/money allowed and would be out by Christmas.
He didn't say which Christmas.
Trust me, we want this. A lot.
Acknowledgements, Announcements and Apologies
Hmm... this summary's later than last week's how did that happen?
Thanks to Darren Stalder and Cindy Fry, our kind hosts in Seattle; to
Shiro san for some fantastic sushi on Sunday night; to Jesse Broksmith
and Melissa Cain for being our Seattle native guides; to Ward Cunningham
for a lift in his Jeep and for just being Ward; and to Casey West for
reasons I promised not to go into in the summary.
For months now, I've been half joking about sending me jobs in the last
little bit of this summary, but I really mean it now. If anyone's
looking for an experienced OO Perl programmer and half experienced
writer, I'm hunting work. Please get in touch at the address below.
As ever, if you've appreciated this summary, please consider one or more
of the following options:
* Send money to the Perl Foundation at
http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ and help support the ongoing
development of Perl.
* Get involved in the Perl 6 process. The mailing lists are open to
all. http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ and http://www.parrotcode.org/
are good starting points with links to the appropriate mailing
lists.
* Send feedback, flames, money, photographic and writing commissions,
or a cute little iSight to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Piers
