Another week, and its load of patches. A major evolution of the UTF8 implementation, some experimental surgery on the debugger, weak hashes, strong pack templates, Win32 modules and quite a number of new ideas are summarized in this week's summary.
Jarkko Hietaniemi solved the problems pertaining UTF8 locales that I
summarized last week (see bug #19743). If I understand correctly
The newest version of Encode (1.84, released by Dan Kogai last week) now reports malformed data read from an UTF8 filehandle.
Moreover, the -C command-line switch is now required to enable UTF8-ification of I/O. It no longer occurs automatically (and silently) when perl is run under an UTF8 locale. Another way to achieve this is to set the environment variable PERL_UTF8_LOCALE. (Running smoke tests with this variable set and with an UTF8 locale would be a good idea.)
(PS: hijacking -C doesn't mean that wide system calls are to be dropped on Windows. Gurusamy Sarathy said that he'll look at them in the future.)
Abigail's smoke tests on Linux show a regular failure on a regression test concerning integer modulus, when perl is compiled with 64 bit capability. Other people are unable to reproduce it, so we may start to blame the glibc or something.
Bug #20218, reported by Dirk Koopman, demonstrates that the debugger is ten times slower (under some circumstances) in perl 5.8.0 than in perl 5.6.1.
Jarkko Hietaniemi then found a single one-line change that is to be blamed for a large part of this slowdown. The discussion continues...
Mark Mielke asked for ways to implement weak hashes in Perl (i.e. hashes that contain weak references, and from which keys are deleted when the weak reference is collected.) Several alternatives were proposed.
pack() Wolfgang Laun proposed a huge patch to the pack() and unpack() functions,
that fixes a lot of problems. He's still working on it, as it's not
perfect yet. On his to-do list is also defining the syntax for the
template language. We're looking forward for it.
Rafael Kitover sent a huge set of patches for the libwin32 bundle, a suite of Windows-specific modules, maintained on CPAN by Gurusamy Sarathy.
Brent Dax proposed to add a new prototype to mimic the delete() built-in
(i.e. define a function that takes an hash/array slice/element as
argument.) Rafael Garcia-Suarez answered that this is possible, but not
trivial.
Paul Marquess says that he's almost finished putting a module together,
called DBM_Filter, that builds on the existing DBM Filter hooks, but makes
it easer to write DBM Filters and to stack multiple filters. This is
intended to allow writing encoding filters for the.*DBM?_File modules.
He asks whether this module should go in the core. Nobody commented.
The same bug was reported as #20154 and #20357 : a case of coredump caused
by goto() inside a do/while or a for loop.
Nicholas Clark had a damn good idea about optimizing the entersub op (executed when a subroutine is called.)
Campo Weijerman remarked that isa() doesn't work on magic variables. This
was promptly fixed.
Ton Hospel continues to report obscure bugs. (bug #20321, indexing the result of a listcontext match inside a string interpolation looses values.)
Jason Lee notes that %lf is not recognized by perl 5.8.0 in a printf()
format. This is apparently not the right thing. (bug #20339.)
Dave Rolsky asked if it was possible to call perl's regex engine from XS code. Nick Ing-Simmons provided an answer (and a few hints) : it's indeed possible, but tricky and risky, as there is no clean external interface to the regex engine.
Alan Burlison advertised his newest creation, Solaris-PerlGcc (found on CPAN), that allows to compile modules against the perl shipped with Solaris, with the gcc compiler.
This summary brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Summaries are available on http://use.perl.org/ and/or via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org . Comments and corrections are welcome.