The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 02 May 2007. Larry, Nicholas, Jesse, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.
Allison:
- I spoke this weekend at LinuxFest Northwest (so did chromatic). I was pleased at the response, including some C hackers who were interested in contributing, and a Perl hacker who implemented a way to parallelize our test suite during chromatic's talk. We'll definitely have to speak at more Linux conferences.
- A good part of my Parrot time last week was taken up preparing my talk, but I've gotten pretty close to a first draft on the PMC PDD. I plan to check it in later this week.
- Also, this week's "file of the week" is the C file for the core of the object implementation. We're working on refactoring that to integrate the new objects implementatiog
Larry:
- going to the History of Programming Languages at the start of June
- I'll give a short talk in the scripting language paradigm, past, present, and future
- cogitating on various design issues
- revised how autodefinitions of proxies work
- generalizes nicely to taking prototype objects
- attach a lazy closure to it to run on demand
- it returns a list of build arguments
- it can lazily construct a class when you call the first method on it
- use it with a role name to generate a role proto-object
- with initializers
- without committing to build an object to construct the role
- feed it to your C with your regular named arguments
- looks like a clean way to pass in type information without using funky name mangling
- working with someone to spec out pipeline IO
- working on various other IO specifications myself
- just getting my ducks in a row for summer travel
- working with fglock a lot on getting his v6 parser to parse STD.pm
- also to output P6 code closures, rather than Perl 5
- because Pugs already has good support for closures and can link to itself more easily than Perl 5 to Perl 6, that we can build the grammar tree and do subsequent parsing more easily than we can feed it across the gateway
- maybe that's the short way to a bootstrap
Jesse:
- how much work will it take before you can see if it's productive?
Larry:
- Flavio thinks that it'll be another couple of weeks before he has the v6 parser in sufficiently good shape
- that should give us good feedback even when running under the Perl 5 engine
- that still leaves the problem of bridging
- once you have that spitting out Perl 5 code, making it spit out Perl 6 code instead is probably not too much of a stretch
Jesse:
- are there parallelizable jobs?
Larry:
- down the path, the Haskell engine needs to provide more support
- I don't know what that would be yet
- once you get one backend giving out, other backends become more possible
c:
- my report is the same as Allison's
- working with Brad Fitzpatrick on parallelization
Nicholas:
- I want parallel tests too
- I tried to work that with Test::Harness, but it's ugly
- though I'd wait until TAP::Parser entered the core
Jesse:
- I want to raise the DLR thing
- just want to raise the question of why don't people consider Perl a target?
- does the new DLR stuff give a possible Perl 6 implementor more rope?
Larry:
- the .Net folks several years ago didn't want to support continuations
- they were okay with emulating it
- obviously if Ruby's running on .Net, they support continuations somehow
c:
Larry:
- continuations aren't required for the core features of Perl 6
- we've danced around the edges with things like resumable exceptions
- by requiring stack unwinding operations, resuming an exception can be returning from the exception handler
- if we want to write our own regex engine in Perl 6, it'd be awfully nice if we had continuations
c:
- unless it adds nice tools for building languages, I don't see much compelling use for it at the moment
Larry:
- if we get our stack working well, it might be a compelling target
Nicholas:
- my message on London PM was that corporate funding paid for the finishing of IronPython and Ruby on the JVM
- don't know how much work ActiveState put into their Perl port
c:
- it's an attempt to appear relevant in the face of hype
- if there were Fortran on Rails, Sun and Microsoft would be falling all over themselves to get Fortran on the JVM and the CLR
