Perl 6 Design Minutes for 20 August 2008

brian_d_foy on 2008-09-16T06:34:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 20 August 2008. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, and Jesse attended.

Larry:

  • decommuting from Copenhagen
  • couple of tiring days wandering city
  • mostly hacking on STD.pm grammar to speed it up a bit
  • mostly propagating ratchet optimization around
  • compiles itself in under 90 secs
  • it's an improvement
  • also working on adding rudimentary symbol table checking
  • can figure out where it's misparsing things as function calls
  • getting ready for trip to Japan next week
  • lightweight languages conference, for some definition of "lightweight"

Patrick:

  • returning home from Copenhagen, which was quite productive
  • on the plane ride I implemented pieces for precompiled modules in Rakudo
  • finished that up last night, so now Rakudo can use precompiled modules
  • spectest_regression on my box went from 12 minutes to under 4 minutes
  • it also means that use statement can start doing load_bytecode things
  • today been working on lazy lists with jonathan
  • much of my time in the next couple of days will be writing reports and blog posts, catching up on events at OSCON and YAPC::EU
  • also, at YAPC::EU hackathon Jesse and I put in some refactoring on Rakudo's ROADMAP, identifying task dependencies and some relative effort required

Jerry:

  • GSOC update; mentors reviewing and submitting final reports
  • looks very good that all three are completing
  • very successful SOC
  • we have good NCI stubs for Parrot, no longer need to write function signatures for things in C header files
  • have 700 new tests added by Adrian for Perl 6 spectests
  • have mostly complete GC implementation (some debugging needed)

Jesse:

  • the recent blog post sounded a little "unhappy" with outcome

Jerry:

  • yes, that the student's self-perspective
  • however, it's design-wise complete, just not debugged fully

Allison:

  • we didn't expect total rewrite of GC system
  • we can do the GC integration with Parrot
  • he did what we needed him to do, indeed he went much farther than I expected

Patrick:

  • chromatic also mentioned that things are farther along than intimated
  • just need a bit more debugging before we can pull it back into trunk
  • didn't want to potentially block others' progress

Jerry:

  • trying to catch up on work done at YAPC::EU
  • much didn't happen online
  • missed out on some good conversations
  • today discussed exportation in Parrot on IRC with Patrick

Jesse:

  • getting way too little sleep at YAPC
  • very nice conversations with Patrick
  • developed ROADMAP, put estimates of relative effort on them
  • there's a lot less left to do than I would've estimated
  • I also talked to Jonathan about what he'll be up to after his current grants expire

Allison:

  • reverse commute from Copenhagen
  • diving right into mmd branch, have tasklist
  • Andrew and smash very helpful
  • finished parsing of multi declarations
  • build multi-dispatch table from C declarations
  • then deprecate a bunch of C code to get to a single mmd impl
  • roll that branch back into trunk
  • should finish MMD milestone this week or next
  • then it's onto IO implementation

Jesse:

  • Perl 6 IO specification was flagged in Saturday's discussions
  • Where does that belong?

Larry:

  • I've looked at it a few times, it's certainly not complete
  • "It's just a library issue!"
  • it needs some TLC

Jesse:

  • Are there others worth harassing for proto-TLC?

Larry:

  • where IO interacts with concurrency I tend to sweep under the carpet
  • I tend to not stress about it
  • let's do one step better than P5 and not worry about it

Patrick:

  • I also think that as long as we can soon provide an implementation that can do basic file I/O and sockets, then people can explore and play in the design space

Larry:

  • as long as it's properly OO to begin with, there's lots of room to play

Allison:

  • Parrot's IO model is becoming much more OO, yes

Jesse:

  • could Rakudo take care of providing an OO interface to Parrot's IO?

Allison:

  • independent of Rakudo, Parrot IO needs to be OO
  • the old design seems to be "reinventing multiple systems to do the same thing"
  • also wanted to mention volunteers working on test.parrot.org
  • moving pages over to new parrot.org domain
  • as soon as pages are moved over, we just need security certificate