The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 2004-05-09
Ooh look. Stuff's been happening in perl6-internals again. Will wonders
never cease?
Building NCI by default
Bernhard Schmalhofer posted a patch to turn on building libnci.so by
default so that the tests in t/pmc/nci.t would get run on more builds by
default. Leo Tötsch applied them and sat back to see what broke. He,
Nicholas Clark and Andrew Dougherty went on to have a discussion about
when dynamic loading may not be available (Did you know that Crays don't
do dynamic loading?) or desirable.
Various OSes broke, and appropriate patches were created and applied.
http://tinyurl.com/24b2q
MMD and bytecode implementations
There was some debate on how register saving should be handled when
doing multi method dispatch to operators that end up with an
implementation in bytecode. I was involved in this discussion and I'm
still busy arguing my corner. So, rather than abuse this particular
soapbox with a partial (as in 'not impartial') summary, I'm just going
to point you at the root message of the thread.
http://tinyurl.com/3xgvr
Embedding and the stack
Dan ruled on PMCs that live outside parrot, and on calling into parrot
from the outside. Brent Royal-Gordon implemented a 'proof of concept'
that got applied pretty quickly. Nicholas Clark wasn't entirely
convinced that everything in the garden was lovely, but we're currently
in 'suck it and see' mode.
http://tinyurl.com/ys763
The ongoing saga of cygwin
Cygwin had all sorts of problems this week, with ICU, with NCI and (no
surprise really) garbage collection. Joshua Gatcomb acted as Leo's eyes
and hands during an extended bug hunt which ended with all tests passing
and parrot running pleasingly quickly on the cygwin platform.
http://tinyurl.com/2od24
http://tinyurl.com/35wgl
http://tinyurl.com/22gts
http://tinyurl.com/2h3bc
http://tinyurl.com/yvshw
http://tinyurl.com/2dewg
NCI Nested struct access broken
Leo on chromatic tracked down a bug with accessing nested structs when
using the Native Call Interface.
http://tinyurl.com/2658o
Async IO notes
Dan dropped a few notes on how Parrot's asynchronous IO was going to
work.
http://tinyurl.com/3guj9
The linker TODO
In another of his TODO tasks for the interested, Dan asked for someone
to tidy up the parrot link stages so that the various parrot libraries
were rather less promiscuous about exporting symbols. The problem's not
solved yet, but it's being worked on.
http://tinyurl.com/ypuvm
Towards a final events design
Dan's working on the design Parrot's event and IO system and he had a
question about dealing with external events. Discussion ensued. Some of
it related to Dan's question.
http://tinyurl.com/27hd6
Return Continuations
Dan was about to implement the previously discussed return continuation
register, but Leo argued that it should be done gradually and, I think,
carried the day.
http://tinyurl.com/33n97
NCI sub call syntax in PIR
Leo's rejigged IMCC so that making an NCI call is a little easier.
http://tinyurl.com/2x7me
Documentation on writing PMCs
Nicholas Clark asked after documentation on how to write a PMC. It turns
out there isn't any in the distribution, but Mike Scott has some useful
stuff on his Wiki. It seems that Real Men use the source. Hopefully this
will change eventually (soon?).
http://tinyurl.com/2tdzf
http://tinyurl.com/3awww
Ponie's performing pants
Nicholas Clark reported that, now that ponie is using PMCs to handle
Perl scalars, Ponie's performance is now 'pants'. It turned out to be a
problem with Garbage Collection. The initial fix gave a massive
performance increase, but there are still issues to address.
http://tinyurl.com/37bl3
Meanwhile, in perl6-language
Returning from rules
Larry ruled on Luke Palmer's rule return proposal. Essentially the
proposal as it stood was rejected in favour of a possible new "succeed"
keyword/macro.
http://tinyurl.com/26bc6
Required named parameters never go away do they?
Dov Wasserman chimed in on the subject of required named parameters.
Larry was unconvinced by his proposal.
http://tinyurl.com/3elbs
Specifying class interfaces with "AUTOMETH"
Austin Hastings had some questions about "AUTOMETH" and "AUTOMETHDEF".
It appears from Larry's answers that Austin had the wrong end of that
particular stick.
http://tinyurl.com/yrp4k
Named parameters vs. slurpy hash syntax
Dov Wasserman worries that named parameters and slurpy hash arguments
don't get on very well. Others disagreed.
http://tinyurl.com/29bj4
"is rw" trait's effect on signature
Aaron Sherman pointed to an issue with the "is rw" trait and wondered if
he was making a fool of himself. For some reason the responses turned
into a discussion of the difference between 'isa' and 'does'
relationships. In response to Aaron's question, Dan implied that Aaron
was expecting rather too much to happen at compile time.
http://tinyurl.com/35hf5
Apologies, Announcements, Acknowledgements
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
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http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ -- The Perl Foundation
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