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Perl 6 Design Meeting Minutes for 02 July 2008

brian_d_foy on 2008-08-28T15:21:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 02 July 2008. Allison, Will, Jerry, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Allison:

  • still working on the pdd25cx branch
  • taking way too long five remaining test files
  • I'm going to have zero tolerance for failing tests, even on a branch
  • I broke my natural tendency for that and it's biting me
  • I'll be traveling a lot for the next couple of weeks
  • hope to get one or two tests passing tomorrow
  • two of the failures are PGE, which probably means that no language built on PGE works now, depending on where the test failures apply

Will:

  • Tcl still fails a ton of tests on the branch now
  • that's not far off the mark

Jerry:

  • do you know the root causes?

Allison:

  • not in PGE
  • but the one I'm working on now is a fundamental problem
  • exception handlers used to be scoped
  • I shifted them over to global in the first stage
  • now I'm shifting them over to the context, so they'll behave like the old system
  • the old system used a global stack, which worked badly with CPS
  • I hope that this change will fix a bunch of the PGE tests

Jerry:

  • Summer of Code is progressing nicely
  • we're coming up on midterms now
  • everyone seems right on track for the Perl 6 and Parrot projects
  • the students are all engaged in their work and the community
  • I have high hopes that they'll continue to be around after the summer
  • Patrick and I need to coordinate our OSCON talk
  • have only had time for administration and question answering
  • don't know what my availability will be after next week, but I'll do my best

Patrick:

  • this year's Summer of Code is far more productive than previous years, from the Perl 6 and Parrot perspective
  • the work that they've done will stick around
  • it's really, really helping out
  • Rakudo now passes 1365 tests out of the spec repository 422 over last week
  • increase of 75 over this morning
  • probably another 50 or so, after the lexical issue is now resolved
  • I can fix $_ and implicit method calls
  • I think that there are a lot of tests that use those; keep noticing some that aren't passing
  • it's been a banner week for adding new tests passes
  • some of it is improvements in Rakudo
  • moritz and auzon are also doing a great job in refactoring the tests, and making sure Rakudo passes them
  • every so often they find a Rakudo bug, we patch it, and we have more passing tests
  • Jonathan and chromatic managed to fix lexical handling over the past week
  • that removes a big blocker for me
  • I cleaned up part of PCT
  • about to clean up part of Rakudo
  • we should get better code generation out of that
  • plan to refactor the builtins to become part of the Any class
  • will fix $_, $!, and $/ to work correctly
  • will refactor parameter passing and handling
  • wrote my third progress report for the Mozilla grant
  • the final report will come out around the time of OSCON

c:

  • fixed some bugs
  • trying to remove as many blockers for Rakudo and other Parrot languages
  • continuing to work with Andrew to make sure his new GC branch compiles and runs and passes all tests

Jerry:

  • he's at 700 failures out of 7700 now right?

c:

  • it didn't even compile a few nights ago
  • so he's making good progress

Will:

  • trying to rip out old stuff from Parrot
  • added a :deprecated flag for ops
  • if you run Parrot with warnings, it'll warn in almost every program
  • started a branch to remove built-in method handling
  • magical non-ops dispatch to class methods on PMCs
  • we're trying to get rid of the old object system
  • the only one we're really using right now is say anyway
  • we don't have to worry about having too many opcodes right now anyway
  • removed a lot of custom code for our Perl::Critic configuration
  • increased our dependencies, decreased custom code
  • fixed a bug for subclassing Float
  • we have a whole class of bugs where when you subclass a PMC, the PMC assumes you have the same C type
  • we need someone to do a review on all of that
  • the RT #48014 is a good place to comment on how to migrate from using the PMC union to PMC attributes

Allison:

  • are we doing any hackathoning after OSCON?

Patrick:

  • I have Saturday open, so we can do that

Jerry:

  • I can do that too

Allison:

  • Larry left Saturday and Sunday open

Patrick:

  • I can move my flight; I have a place to stay on Saturday night too

Allison:

  • if it's just you and Larry, that might be valuable too
  • that's five or six of us
  • where's a good location?

Patrick:

  • it depends on who's coming
  • will Damian make it?
  • there could easy be six or seven of us

Allison:

  • I'll look into spaces
  • let's say Saturday for sure, but Sunday is possible

c:

  • and Friday afternoon and evening

Jerry:

  • I'm meeting with Hank at Microsoft's open source labs
  • he's offered some resources, right?

Allison:

  • smoke testing
  • some Windows licenses

Jerry:

  • now that we're very close to having Smolder work
  • (today or tomorrow)
  • just requires an upgrade to TAP::Harness 3
  • we could make this happen
  • I'll basically follow up and make things happen

Allison:

  • they want something automatable, so they don't have to think about it
  • it'll update once a week or whenever, run the tests, and submit a report