"Adding new lists of things [to remember] to a language is only a good idea if you're making money with certification." -- Juerd Waalboer, on why your program shouldn't have to plead to use new functionality.
"Adding new lists of things [to remember] to a language is only a good idea if you're making money with certification." -- Juerd Waalboer, on why your program shouldn't have to plead to use new functionality.
The "I know Perl, how to learn C" thread continued this week with a number of book and and web site references given. The thread then veered off into a discussion of memory alignment issues, what is a word (in computer memory parlance) and other sundry technical arcana of great interest to C programmers. Many people pointed out (quite rightly) that K&R is still a very good read.
after all these years http://xrl.us/bevz4
Alexandr Ciornii discovered that Perl_ck_subr lost its public status
in the API somewhere between 5.8 and 5.10. This resulted in a compilation
failure on Windows for autobox, the hippest module on the block. He
noted that he could provoke the same behaviour on Linux if he removed
the PERL_CORE preprocessor definition. Silence ensued.
and I thought autobox wasn't yet core http://xrl.us/bevz8
Michael G. Schwern saw no reason why date operations involving results that pushed out beyond 2038 (and thus wrap around the 32 time_t quantity) should not just do The Right Thing. No takers.
hopefully I shall be retired by then http://xrl.us/bev2a
autoconf) Enrico Weigelt reported that he had managed to set up an
autoconf-based technique for building perl. This would allow
him to make it easier to cross-compile Perl. He had managed to
build the core interpreter but was stuck on how to build the
standard extensions.
The porters explained that they were unlikely to move away from
the current metaconf system, since it allows the source to
build build on many non-GNU, non-POSIX hosts.
People tried to explain how the current cross-compilation mechanism
works but it appears that few people have any real experience in
the matter. No autoconf experts were able to answer Enrico's
questions concerning how to build extensions, either.
A work in progress http://xrl.us/bev2e
Nicholas Clark uncovered an ancient bug in the regexp code. It started of with a boolean value that was able to take values other than 0 and 1, which was a nice touch. It turned out that it was then binary-or'ed with a bit that happened to lie way past the most significant bit of the datatype being used to hold the boolean. Since the bit in question was to indicate that the pattern was tainted, we have a bit of a problem on our hands.
The first thing was able to see whether it was possible to construct a test case that could expose the flawed behaviour. Rick Delaney was first past the post with a test that demonstrated the problem, and a fix that produced the correct behaviour.
Ben Morrow proposed a different test, that Abigail tweaked to show that the problem existed all the way back to 5.004. This was important, for the code the Nicholas found was traced back to change #267, committed to the repository in 1997. Unfortunately, the change was a jumbo patch that changed all sorts of things in the regexp engine.
ye olde bugge http://xrl.us/bev2i http://public.activestate.com/cgi-bin/perlbrowse/p/267
Nicholas Clark discovered that an innocuous change to perl.c created
a "argument 'flags' might be clobbered by `longjmp' or `vfork'" warning
and wondered what needed to be done to the code in order to make gcc
happy again. Zefram and Hugo van der Sanden explained that the flags
variable needed to be made volatile. Zefram went on to explain why
it was so, in sufficient detail to merit the badge of "resident C guru".
http://xrl.us/bev2k
Module::Build interim release Ken Williams wanted to integrate the changes that were required to get
5.10 out the door back into the mainline Module::Build codebase. Most
of the changes are test tweaks to skip troublesome issues on VMS.
Craig Berry agreed that the VMS porters ran out of time in the run-up to 5.10, and it would be nice to go back and tidy up the loose ends.
mopping up http://xrl.us/bev2n
Nicholas Clark was up to his elbows as usual, grovelling around in pp.c
and pp_hot.c, seeing if you could shift elements off PL_curstack.
Presumably to make things go faster. After watching things blow up for a
while, he concluded that what he wanted to do couldn't be done.
not that I really understood anything http://xrl.us/bev2t
Kaye Offer wondered why $foo =~ /(bar)/; in void context does not warn,
but $foo !~ /(bar)/; does. Aristotle Pagaltzis and Rafael Garcia-Suarez
did a pretty good job of explaining why thing were the way they were.
it's a feature http://xrl.us/bev2v
Reini Urban announced that he had taken a look at the perl compiler that had been removed from the 5.10.0 release. He lavished sufficient care upon it to get to compile again, although there were problems with the test suite.
Reini thought that the simple stack-based op-tree could be JITted easily into machine code and was looking at the GNU lightning library. He wanted to know if anyone else had had a look at this approach before.
Nicholas Clark explained that overloaded or tied SVs make JITting really hard, and that some of the ops were so high-level that JITting them would produce copious amounts of machine instructions which in turn would make a mess of a CPU instruction cache.
Joshua ben Jore pointed to Marc Lehmann's Faster project, that takes a Perl routine and turns it into C.
http://xrl.us/bev2x
Jerry D. Hedden asked why Configure probes for alternatives to
sprintf that produce identical behaviour to sprint("%g"), and
why not just use sprintf and be done with it. Andy Dougherty
explained that some platforms, such as Solaris, have alternate
functions available in the system C library that offer much better
performance. In such cases, Configure favours them over sprintf.
only the best http://xrl.us/bev23
Runops::Switch - problem testing OP_SAY Jim Cromie discovered that Runops::Switch needed a tweak to recognise
the new say in 5.10 and made a preliminary patch to get it to work.
Rafael upgraded the module in any event, but Jim's patch reminded Jan
Dubois that people should never link directly to the Perl_pp_*
routines, since they are not part of the public API.
http://xrl.us/bev25
perl5.6.2 -e 'delete $ENV{PATH}' segfault on Solaris 10 Ralf Hack provided a recipe for people to follow, should they be stuck on a modern Solaris with an old perl, and attempt to delete environment variables.
one day this might happen to *you* http://xrl.us/bev27
Following on from change #33049 when warnings about loss of precision were tweaked, Nicholas Clark noticed that the win32/config.bc file failed the Don't Repeat Yourself principle, and wondered whether it would be possible to have it generated automatically.
Steve Hay mumbled something about keeping things in sync and having a mind to write a script to do it, but not actually having got around to doing something about it.
low itch factor http://xrl.us/bev29
struct context now 12.5% smaller than 5.10 Nicholas Clark was as pleased as Punch after pulling out an IV
and a pointer from struct context. And after thinking about it
a bit more, thought of another possible restructuring to save a bit
more space. Benjamin Smith took Nicholas's second idea and coded
a patch to implement it, and in the process discovered another
improvement that Nicholas missed initially.
At the end, Nicholas applied all the discovered slimming goodness to blead.
nest scopes with impunity http://xrl.us/bev3b
lc(undef) is not undef: bug or feature? Alberto Simões was a little surprised to learn that lc(undef)
returns the empty string, and does not warn when doing so. Abigail
reminded people that Perl's undef is not like SQL's null with
its capacity to turn everything it touches to null. Perl will
turn undef into zero or the empty string as appropriate and
will warn when it does so, if you ask for it.
Jonathon Rockway noticed that \L, \u and the like also behaved
the same way. Michael G. Schwern bet the contents of a capture
variable that \L and lc were implemented using the same
underlying opcode, which was confirmed by a quick glance at
toke.c.
Rafael Garcia-Suarez added some code to make things warn, along with a few regression tests as change #33088. He hoped that people would bang on it and see if anything breaks.
in that case http://xrl.us/bev3d
David Nicol wished that a warning would be issued when map was fed a reference to an array, instead of an array. This reminded Aristotle Pagaltzis that this was exactly the thing that Mark-Jason Dominus's proposal a few weeks ago was designed to approach: raising a warning when a reference is directly stringified or numified.
Juerd Waalboer pointed out map takes a list, and an arrayref
is merely a one element list. In fact, you cannot do anything
other than give a list to map. It just might not contain what you
thought it should.
http://xrl.us/bev3j
Following on from the above thread, Aristotle then restarted the "references should not stringify" discussion, which covered more or less the same ground as it did last month. Michael G. Schwern summed it up pretty well "there are times when you just want an object to stringify, usually for debugging purposes, and there are times when you don't, usually for production purposes."
At the moment, no-one knows how to reconcile these differences,
although Ben Morrow revealed a clever use of Hash::Util::Fieldhash.
http://xrl.us/bev3m
Elsewhere in his wanderings around the codebase, Nicholas Clark caught sight
of an oddity in pp_enteriter (that sets up a foreach loop). He
thought that be undoing an 8 year old change by Gurusamy Sarathy, it should
be possible to provoke the bug the change was designed to fix. But, rather
surprisingly, the code continued to work anyway.
Dave Mitchell's work on lexical and closure cleanups for 5.10 turned out to simplify matters considerably which in turn allows Nicholas to chop out a certain amount of redundant checks.
unexpected bonus http://xrl.us/bev3q
Robin Barker had a look a Devel::DProf and noticed a certain amount
of cruft that he was able to prune, some that had been lying around
since 1999. Applied.
all gone http://xrl.us/bev3y http://xrl.us/bev34 http://xrl.us/bev4a
He then took a couple of stabs at making a warning about a volatile declaration go away. Unapplied.
http://xrl.us/bev32 http://xrl.us/bev36
Steven Schubiger did some consting goodness of his own, and added a bit to util.c. Applied.
it's all good http://xrl.us/bev4g
Steve Hay was busy smoking Perl this week, and both 5.8 and 5.11 were complaining during the compilation stage and falling apart in the tests.
Smoke [5.8.8] 33008 FAIL(F) MSWin32 WinXP/.Net SP2 (x86/2 cpu) http://xrl.us/bev4i
Smoke [5.11.0] 33018 FAIL(F) MSWin32 WinXP/.Net SP2 (x86/2 cpu) http://xrl.us/bev4k
Jarkko Hietaniemi reported a failure compiling with C++ on a Tru64 Alpha. Steve Peters couldn't find any problems when using g++, but thankfully Solaris's C++ compiler obligingly fell over, which allowed him to compose a first patch to get IPC::SysV up and running again.
Jarkko followed up with an improved patch to do the same on Tru64. Rafael applied this, which then caused Solaris to break again, so Steve had to go back and tweak the tweak.
Smoke [5.11.0] 33016 FAIL(XM) OSF1 V5.1 (EV6/4 cpu) http://xrl.us/bev4n
state variable not available (#49522) Dave Mitchell worked out what the problem was with Abigail's state
variables, tracing it to a problem with the Svf_PADSTALE flag,
which meant, in the context of state variables, that the variable
had not been initialised, rather than having gone out of scope. A
few lines of code, some tests, and the job was done.
affairs of state http://xrl.us/bev4z
strict now uses caller, unintended interaction with Safe (#50084) Simon Cozens reported that he had heard from the Postgresql developers
running into trouble embedding Perl in Pg. Their simple recipe that
worked in 5.8 no longer works in 5.10, as strict makes use of caller
and the latter is not in the default list of permitted operations.
Probably not a major deal, but probably something that needs to be documented.
playing it safe http://xrl.us/bev47
"mls" provided a one-liner that produces a panic in 5.10 with a regular expression. The report went as far to identify the offending code and make a suggestion as to how it might be fixed.
http://xrl.us/bev49
enc2xs -C scans the current directory (#50116) "mls" also suggested that enc2xs (part of the Encode distribution,
to add new encodings to perl) should not search . when -C is
used.
http://xrl.us/bev5b
Johan Vromans posted the nth bug report concerning a problem with
an explicit shift of @ARGV within a subroutine. Dave Mitchell
explained that it was a long-standing bug due to the fact that items
weren't reference counted on the stack, and that perl really ought
to start doing the right thing.
http://xrl.us/bev5d
File::Temp and unsafe shell characters (#50146) Ed Avis was alarmed to discover that if you move into a directory
named `rm -rf /`, ask File::Temp to create a file
in said directory and open the file, you can be in a lot of
trouble if it's the super-user that's running the script.
To counter this, Ed felt that File::Temp should ensure that
anything it returned to client code should be filtered to strip
out shellish meta-characters.
Mark Overmeer pointed out that the problem doesn't exist with the
3-arg form of open and that maybe the best solution was to
deprecate the 2-arg form in 5.12.
shell game http://xrl.us/bev5f
-W and spurious 'will not stay shared' message (#50160) Eric Promislow had some code that developed a tricky regexp with
a (??{...}) construct and wondered why it issued a "will not
stay shared" warning. Dave Mitchell explained that one should always
use package variables with the ??{...} construct, at least until
5.12 at the earliest.
http://xrl.us/bev5h
pos is much slower with "progressive match" and unicode (#50250) Heinz Knutzen discovered that a simple loop involving a pos was
about 2000 times slower in 5.10 compared with 5.8.8. Dave Mitchell
profiled the code and discovered that Perl_utf_length was
soaking up an inordinate number of cycles. This led him to conclude
that there was something broken in the UTF-8 length cache code.
http://xrl.us/bev5m
perl -e 'split //, unpack "(B)*", "ab"' (#50256) mauke reported this crash on 5.10.0 (and it looks like it was there in 5.8.8 as well). No-one ventured a reason as to why.
http://xrl.us/bev5o
317 new + 1482 open = 1799 (11 created this week) http://xrl.us/bev5q
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
A recent change (#33030) by Nicholas Clark broke PadWalker. But PadWalker being what it is, no-one was really surprised.
http://xrl.us/bev3o
Jerry D. Hedden made the installperl target not complain about
finding perl in the build directory.
http://xrl.us/bev3u
H.Merijn Brand reported good results with his Configure and metaunits work.
He was down to 16 warnings, and the promise of several files that could
be removed from the branch once everything was wrapped up. Andy Dougherty
rejoiced.
and we all breathed a sigh of relief http://xrl.us/bevzs
Andy Dougherty suggested a pre-5.005-compatible patch to Configure to
get the 5.8.9 snapshot to compile on IRIX. Alas, David Cantrell reported
no joy.
http://xrl.us/bevzw
Elsewhere in the push to bring on 5.8.9, Alexey Tourbin noticed that
a recent change was causing tests to fail in Term::ReadLine::Gnu
http://xrl.us/bev2c
Steven Schubiger had a make test fail with copious reports of
undefined symbol: __stack_chk_fail_local. No-one ventured a
reason as to what or why things blew up.
try make distclean http://xrl.us/bev2g
Yamashina Hio wrote some POD in English which was fine, but the same POD in Japanese failed to produce correct text for link references. No-one was able to provide any clues.
http://xrl.us/bev2p
Nicholas Clark made t/op/inc.t happy again, regarding the overflowing of an integer following an increment (change #33049)
http://xrl.us/bevz2
Andreas König reported that the All Perl Changes (APC) repository now deals with 5.10 correctly, and all sorts of tarballs of assorted versions of Perl are available.
and there was much rejoicing http://xrl.us/bev2r
Regarding the BBC and Apache::DB, Richard Foley wondered if there was
a parallel with the problems he was having with other modules with
Apache on 5.10, such as B::TerseSize.
http://xrl.us/bev2z
Abigail added some regression tests to t/cmd/for.t to ensure that
for reverse .. does not break one day.
http://xrl.us/bev38
Jerry D. Hedden wrote a patch tp suppress imprecision warnings in t/op/64bitint.t. Applied by Nicholas.
http://xrl.us/bev4c
Jan Dubois pointed out that socketpair() is available on Win32, and
has been for quite some time (as in, prior to 5.8).
only the documentation was buggy http://xrl.us/bev4e
This summary was written by David Landgren.
In last week's summary, I explained that Moritz Lenz was disappointed
that a regexp would not recurse into an interpolated qr//. In
actual fact it does, and Moritz was really wishing that it wouldn't.
Apologies to those confused by my confusion.
Aristotle Pagaltzis also noticed that my xrl.us short linkifier has no error checking, and it spewed garbage into last week's summary.
the code dies screaming http://xrl.us/bevzq
last week's http://xrl.us/bev3h
Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, (subscription: perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org ). The archive is at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/ . Corrections and comments are welcome.
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