Perl 6 Design minutes for 22 October 2008

brian_d_foy on 2008-10-26T23:52:00

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 22 October 2008. Larry, Patrick, Allison, Will, Jerry, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.

Patrick:

  • mostly answering questions about Rakudo design
  • continuing to work on namespace handling there and in PCT
  • continued to work in my head on the lexicals implementation
  • have a little code there too

Larry:

  • looking into shoulder surgery in the next couple of weeks
  • decided that I didn't like the infix:where operator, so I changed it to also to better indicate the leftness to rightness of it
  • working on cutting down the size of the lexer cache in the world of STD and gimme
  • they used to take up 3 GB and now they're down to 450 MB
  • that's by not caching anonymous grammars which they throw away at the end of the current process anyway
  • there's still a long way to go on that
  • if you do a bzipped tar of the lex directory, it ends up with a 200:1 compression
  • still lots of room for removing redundency
  • while I'm looking at lexer caching, I'm trying to figure out the best strategy for getting rid of TRE
  • half of the code just works around its bugs
  • it'd be simpler and probably faster with something more straightforward
  • otherwise little bugs and answering questions

Patrick:

  • you also added usage information to viv
  • thank you

Larry:

  • I abandoned my goal last week of getting it to spit out Perl 6
  • sidetracked into hacking on the lexer
  • other people started to use it
  • but the way they're trying to use it, it runs slowly
  • I'm looking at ways of speeding that up

c:

  • fixed a lot of bugs last week
  • in particular, some of the MMD fallout
  • blockers for mod_parrot
  • we may be able to get under 600 open bugs by the end of the month
  • hopefully under 500 by the end of the year
  • otherwise looking forward to lots of Parrot cleanups

Nicholas:

  • getting close to a RC for Perl 5.8.9

Allison:

  • just flew to SF yesterday and back today

c:

  • and boy are her arms tired

Allison:

  • spent a lot of time on release bugfixing
  • answering questions
  • closing tickets
  • made the significant TGE change we talked about last week
  • updating the calling conventions branch
  • then creating the IO branch
  • those are my tasks for today

Jesse:

  • talked to Richard a little bit about grants

Jerry:

  • just released 0.8.0 yesterday
  • we fixed a lot of bugs on the way to the release
  • but we released it with more than I would have liked
  • can't say why that is
  • two big branch merges though, the MMD and HLL magic branches
  • but we need to address our automated test environment and smokers
  • we'll concentrate on that at the Developer's Summit in November
  • sent out a survey to the mailing list
  • starting to get responses
  • going to the GSoC mentor summit on Friday night, come back Sunday evening
  • at Mountain View