The Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20040125
Welcome to the first summary from my new home in Gateshead. The same old
wibble, with a different view from its window and fewer trips to London.
Right, time to see what's been going on in perl6-internals this week.
Global labels in IMCC
The cryptically named TOGoS wondered how to get the address of a label
in a different IMCC compilation unit. According to Dan there's no way to
do that, and you didn't want to do that anyway.
http://tinyurl.com/3evz2
Dan's threads proposal
After a few weeks of everyone else's proposals, Dan started to outline
the design of Parrot's threading capabilities. He started by defining
his terms (a useful thing to do in a field where there seem to me
multiple competing definitions of various terms) and guaranteeing that
user code wouldn't crash the interpreter (subject to the assumption that
system level memory allocation was thread safe) before getting into the
meat of his proposal. Which you're probably best reading for yourself;
it's a long document but there's very little flab and any attempt of
mine to summarize it would probably end up being at least as long as and
a good deal less lucid than the original.
Of course, this sparked a ton of discussion, generally positive, as
people asked for various clarifications and made suggestions. Gordon
Henriksen pointed out a nasty race condition that means that the garbage
collector can't be made as thread safe as Dan had hoped.
Summarizer Barbie says "Threads are hard!"
On Thursday, Dan posted a last call for comments and objections before
he went on to the detailed design. This time there were some objections,
but I don't think any of 'em are going to stop Dan.
http://tinyurl.com/ys2ar
http://tinyurl.com/29lpb
Vtables organization
Last week Dan had outlined an approach to organizing PMC vtables using a
chaining approach; this week saw the discussion of that proposal with
Benjamin K. Stuhl asking the hard questions.
http://tinyurl.com/35rlc
Benchmark suite
Matt Fowles suggested that it might make sense to create a canonical
suite of benchmarks to exercise Parrot well. His idea being that, if we
have a standard suite of Parrot benchmarks, then potential performance
affecting changes could be tested against that, rather than having
custom benchmarks rolled each time. Luke Palmer pointed to
examples/benchmarks and noted that it's hard to create benchmarks that
test everything. However, he hoped that any good benchmark that gets
posted to the list would get added to this suite, along with some
documentation describing what is being tested.
http://tinyurl.com/22cyj
Number formatting
Dan did some more designing, this time mandating that Parrot will,
eventually adopt ICU's formatting template for numeric templates but, to
start with, we'll be rolling our own. The new op will be "format Sx,
[INP]y, [SP]z".
http://tinyurl.com/2vhuk
Base string transforms
Dan announced that he would be adding "upcase", "downcase", "titlecase"
and "to_chartype" to the various chartype vtables. He also noted that
he'd like to get some alternative chartypes and encodings into Parrot as
soon as possible to make sure we can actually handle things without
having to use Unicode all the time.
http://tinyurl.com/2gvg3
Calling conventions in IMCC
Will Coleda had some problems with IMCC's handling of the parrot calling
conventions when he found that code that worked a couple of months ago
had stopped working in the current Parrot (A month is a *very* long time
in Parrot development though.) The problem took a fair bit of tracking
down and I'm not entirely sure it's entirely fixed yet; Will had reached
the point where the code would compile, but it still wouldn't actually
run.
http://tinyurl.com/3d4c4
Steve Fink's obnoxious test case
Steve Fink posted an obnoxious test case that generated memory
corruption. The test case is obnoxious because it's 56KB of IMCC source
code, and Steve had been unable to reduce it. This didn't discourage Leo
Tötsch though, who set about tracking the bug to its lair. It's not
fixed yet, but with the Patchmonster on the case it can only be a matter
of time.
There were several other GC related issues that cropped up over the
week; I wonder if they're all aspects of a single lurking bug.
http://tinyurl.com/yvnmn
IMCC returning ints
Steve Fink also found a problem with IMCC failing to properly return
integers from unprototyped routines and posted an appropriate patch to
the test suite. It turns out that the problem is that IMCC doesn't quite
implement the full Parrot Calling Conventions, especially the return
convention, but it's getting there.
http://tinyurl.com/2rtzo
The costs of sharing
Leo Töposted a test program and some results for timing the difference
between using shared and unshared PMCs. The shared versions are (not
surprisingly) slower than the unshared ones; the question is whether the
difference between the two can be improved. Hopefully the benchmark will
get checked into examples/benchmarks as suggested by Luke earlier.
http://tinyurl.com/2da47
An array of array types
Dan noted that we have "a pile of different array classes with fuzzy
requirements and specified behaviours which sort of inherit from each
other except when they don't." He suggested that the time had come to
work out what we actually *want* in the way of array classes, compare
our requirements with what we have, and then to do something about
making what was available match what was required. I'm not sure that the
resulting discussion has finalized the set of array types needed, but
it's getting there. (Does anyone else think 'FixedMixedArray' is awfully
clumsy as names go?).
http://tinyurl.com/39gx8
Remember to nag Robert Spier
Robert Spier announced that repairing the web accessible TODO list was
on his personal TODO list and asked to be nagged about it periodically.
Robert, remember you need to fix the web accessible TODO list.
http://tinyurl.com/3269g
Churchill's parrot still swearing
Effortlessly Godwinning himself, Uri Guttman pointed to a press release
which stated that Winston Churchill's parrot, Charlie, is now 104 years
old and can still be coaxed into squawking "Fuck Hitler" and "Fuck the
Nazis" which had apparently made it rather unsuitable for keeping at its
owner's pet shop due to its habit of swearing at children.
http://tinyurl.com/2kjrw
Updated documentation in Perl scripts
Michael Scott continued his sterling work of updating and generally
improving Parrot's documentation. This week his attention fell upon: the
Perl scripts found in build_tools, classes and tools/dev. Top man that
he is, he's currently working on the documentation embedded in C code.
http://tinyurl.com/3gpox
http://tinyurl.com/yr57s
Open issue review
Robert Spier (don't forget the web accessible todo list Robert) posted a
list of the 177 currently outstanding Parrot issues in the RT system and
asked for volunteers to go through them to help weed out those issues
that were no longer current. So people did. Which is nice.
http://tinyurl.com/2nb3t
How to subclass dynamic PMCs
Michal Wallace is trying to make a dynamically loaded PMC that
subclasses another dynamically loaded PMC and he can't work out how to
do it. Leo Tötsch had the answer.
http://tinyurl.com/2yevk
How does Parrot handle High Level Language eval
Nigel Sandever wondered how Parrot would handle "eval" opcodes for
multiple different languages. Leo pointed him at the "compile" op, which
(while it isn't fully implemented yet) will address this issue. Dan
noted that it's currently working for PIR and PASM code but that it
should be able to work eventually with any compiler that generates
standard bytecode.
http://tinyurl.com/2ukrl
Signals and events
Leo is working on turning OS level signals into Parrot level events, and
he's not having an easy time of it. He posted a summary of the issues
and asked for comments. Discussion continues.
http://tinyurl.com/3c795
Threading again
Gordon Henriksen worries that Parrot's current architecture is actively
thread hostile. He also accepted that trying to change it now wasn't
really possible. So he outlined various ways in which the need for
locking could be reduced, which should help speed things up. The big
problem, as Gordon sees it, is that so many Parrot data structures are
mutable, and mutable data structures require locks. And having PMCs that
can morph from one type to another is... well, Gordon claims that
"morph" must die, though he later modified this claim. He and Leo batted
this back and forth for a while; I'm not sure either side is convinced.
http://tinyurl.com/2qwfp
Embedding vs. extending interface types
Mattia Barbon noted that the embedding and extending interfaces were
still using different names for "Parrot_Interp" and "Parrot_INTERP". He
wondered which was correct. It turns out that nobody's quite sure, but
the person who can make the decision -- Dan -- was en route to
Copenhagen when this came up, so there's no answer yet.
http://tinyurl.com/2cdy8
Meanwhile in perl6-language
Semantics of Vector operations
Determined to test everyone's Unicode readiness, Luke Palmer kicked off
a discussion of the semantics of "[1,2,3] »+« [4,5,6]". At first
glance it looks like the result should be "[5,7,9]", but Luke argued
that actually, the code was trying to add two lists, each containing a
single scalar, that just happened to be listrefs. Larry pointed out that
"Doing what you expect at first glance is also called 'not violating the
principle of least surprise'", before going on to surprise us all with
'lopsided' vector ops, which would allow the programmer to specify when
a value was expected to be treated as a scalar:
$a »+« $b # Treat $a and $b as lists
$x +« $y # Treat $x as a scalar and $b as a list
-« @bar # Return a list of every element of @bar, negated
@foo »+ @bar # Add the length of @bar to every element of @foo
Then he scared me with "@foo »+= @foo". He noted that it might take
some getting used to, but that it helped if you pronounce "»" and "«"
as 'each'. Austin Hastings didn't like it (from a syntax highlighting
point of view), but he appeared to be outvoted. Larry pointed out that
"«»" etc were the least of a syntax highlighters worries given that
any "use", "eval" or operator declaration had the potential to morph any
subsequent syntax. Piers Cawley thought that truly accurate syntax
highlighting would have to be done in an image based IDE implemented in
Perl because such an editor would always know what rules were in scope
for a given chunk of code. A. Pagaltzis thought that this would
definitely increment the Smalltalkometer for Perl 6.
As discussion and exploration of this idea continued it became apparent
that people seem to like this particular weirding of the language, and
it certainly allows the programmer to disambiguate things rather neatly.
Luke even pointed out that this new approach allows for calling a method
on a list of values: "@list ».method", and to call a list of methods on
a value: "$value.« @methods".
Then the fun began. The issue is that "»" and "«" can also be written
"<<" and ">>" (but your POD processor hates you for it). This leads to
ambiguities like ">>+<<=<<" (which are even harder to type in a Pod
escape) which can be parsed as "»+<<=«" or "»+«=«" (where << means
'left shift'). Larry wondered if the problem arose because of trying to
make the "<<" and ">>" alternatives look too similar to the Unicode
glyphs.
You know, looking at that last paragraph I can see why people think Perl
6 is horribly scary. The thing is, you're not expected to use
constructions like that in real world programs all the time; but when
you're working out what a grammar should be you *have* to think of all
the nasty edge cases to see where things break.
Anyway, such nastiness led to the possibility of introducing a
'whitespace eating' macro which would allow for the introduction of
disambiguating whitespace. The front runner for this macro is "_".
http://tinyurl.com/38zu9
Comma operator
Remember a few months ago when there was some discussion of replacing
the C style comma with some other glyph? If that were done, one of the
consequences would be that
@foo = 1,2,3;
would fill @foo with three elements instead of just the one as it does
in Perl 5. Joe Gottman had a few questions about the implications of
that, and wondered if Larry had actually ruled on it. Larry ruled that
list construction would continue to require brackets (or, if you're
American, parentheses) and went on to discuss some further implications
of that.
http://tinyurl.com/253ag
Acknowledgements, Apologies, Announcements
Thankfully, this section's normal service is resumed this week. The only
catch is, I can't think of anything to say.
However, 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
[EMAIL PROTECTED], or drop by my website (New! Improved!
listening on port 80! Still sadly lacking in desperately new content!)
http://donate.perl-foundation.org/ -- The Perl Foundation
http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ -- Perl 6 Development site
http://www.bofh.org.uk/ -- My website, "Just a Summary"
