Perl 6 Design Minutes for 03 October 2007

brian_d_foy on 2007-10-05T16:59:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 03 October 2007. Larry, Allison, Jerry, Will, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.

Patrick:

  • worked on getting PGE to work with Parrot's new object model and vice-versa
  • created a branch for the pct refactor -- still need to check in some updates
  • I have a draft of the AST design document; will likely check it into the repo tomorrow for comments and updates

Larry:

  • didn't do anything on the spec
  • mostly re-hacking the lexer optimizer
  • the approach from last week was a dead end
  • now the program spits out the AST as chunks of YAML
  • I was trying to second-guess the information I need
  • turns out I needed most of it
  • I'm much happier now

Jesse:

  • what's next?

Larry:

  • making it work
  • the generated lexer is an egrep-style regular expression
  • I need something to take that and do lexing
  • it's not clear what I'll use or if I'll roll my own
  • it needs something which resembles longest-token matches
  • if someone had written an egrep-clone in Perl 6 then I'd just use it

Jesse:

  • have you put that challenge to #perl6 yet?

c:

  • he will have when I publish these notes

Larry:

  • it's probably a week too soon for that
  • they're having more fun playing with the CL backend
  • it's almost to the point of the Perl 5 backend now
  • I'm trying to keep a low profile these days and get some work done

Allison:

  • things in Parrot are excellent
  • hacking on objects all week
  • I'm about to check in a patch that fixes the last MMD system failures in the branch
  • that's the last major broken subsystem aside from PGE
  • the rest of the failing tests mostly don't instantiate new PMCs correctly
  • I may have a hack that could enforce correct instantiation
  • clean up the core usage, not just the surface usage
  • that should clear up a lot of the tests as well

Jerry:

  • why do you call that a hack?
  • it sounds pretty good

Allison:

  • it checks type ids to decide what it's instantiating
  • it's a little more code
  • eventually I'd like to get rid of that as well
  • we didn't actually roll out the branch at the end of the month
  • we're not too many days off though
  • if Patrick doesn't get to PGE when I clean up a few tests, I'll just do the change for him
  • it's a small change

Jesse:

  • do you have a sense of when he'll be able to get back to Perl 6?

Allison:

  • this week
  • he put that aside temporarily to finish a funded milestone
  • he said yesterday that he had a nearly-complete draft to check in
  • this is infrastructure he needs to finish Perl 6

Jesse:

  • it's all critical path stuff, I know

c:

  • helping Allison by cleaning up the edges of PDD15
  • adding a couple of small features
  • fixing some bugs
  • found and fixed some unrelated bugs that were bothering me
  • looking at some optimizations
  • put one in, waiting on PDD15 branch to land for another
  • reviewing some benchmark code that someone said was a lot slower in Parrot
  • will have more details on that soon

Nicholas:

  • spent a lot of time looking at CPAN code
  • lots of it is pretty mediocre
  • reviewing how people use C
  • I put a hack into maintperl to help Class::DBI
  • did see that Flavio has released KP6 to the CPAN (on October 4)

Jerry:

  • working with Allison on the PDD 15 branch
  • fixing up tests, examples, other code to use the new model
  • the most important thing for me is when Patrick finishes blocking
  • then I can turn my efforts to Perl 6

Will:

  • just trying to give guidance on #parrot when anyone needs it
  • otherwise, work keeps sucking up my free time

Jesse:

  • not much going on here
  • will be out of town next week