The Perl 6 Design Team met by phone on 07 January 2009. Larry, Jerry,
Allison, Patrick, Jesse, and chromatic attended.
Larry:
- real life has been hectic
- some family sickness
- lots of meetings at work
- mostly just sniping at various design issues
- not a lot of bandwidth to think through deeper questions
- periodically running tests on STD to make sure it keeps passing tests
- not much exciting coming up until April
- going to Oslo, and then a tour of Ivy League colleges
Jerry:
- continuing to work in S19
- expect to have all of the TODO items addressed this week
- should be ready for another review
- hopefully close to approval as a working draft
- I won't wait for that approval; will start on the tests as soon as I finish the incomplete sections
- occasionally offering helpful suggestions and doing small bits of work on Parrot and Rakudo
- recent modifications to Rakudo's makefile
- added some targets and reorganized for maintainability
- also working on parrot.org infrastructure, now that the holidays are over
- working on moving Parrot's SVN to parrot.org at the end of January
- will probably be able to get a Smolder server set up too
- there's some talk of getting a Git mirror available
- haven't worked on that yet
c:
- minor bug fixes and improvements
- hope to merge in the GC reorganization refactor tonight or tomorrow
- also participating in a discussion with Allison and Patrick about referring to types in other HLLs
Patrick:
- mostly working on my variable handling branch refactoring
- Jonathan's working on that too
- it's going very well
- the code ends up much shorter, and we get better and more correct behavior all around
- upgrading PCT and the Perl 6 object system to support changes that we want for Rakudo
- they're all minor changes
- they're useful for other languages too
- Stephen Weeks updated Parrot so that we can have multiple HLLs running in the same interpreter
- they run in their own space
- we now have the
:lang option to eval, where you can run a language other than Perl which Parrot understands
Jesse:
- how much can you pass between the various languages?
Patrick:
- it depends on the other language at the moment
- you can get an object back
- the other language can't see your lexical variables yet
- that's just Rakudo at the moment
- you can send messages to those objects
- he's reimplementing Pheme to use PCT which should make that easier
Jerry:
- that only works for
eval right now and not use - that's just a matter of syntax
Patrick:
- we don't have the ability to define custom quote operators from within Perl 6 yet
- it wouldn't be too hard to add a special one
- or a function which did that for you
- continuing on the variable branch
- Jonathan and I are in alignment on how we expect things to work
- expect to merge in the next day or two
- that'll close a bunch of tickets
- especially in dealing with parameter oddities and such
- then I'll update the roadmap
- it's kind of out of date, thanks to our progress in December
- we can mark a lot of things as done now
- I'll revise it to be something more prose-y
Jesse:
- will you need to add tasks to the roadmap?
Patrick:
- I can't think of any we need to add
- we can update timelines on a lot of them
- because we finished some prerequisites
- some things we thought wouldn't be possible for a while are now within the realm of possibility
- we fixed lexicals, for example
- I continue to be surprised at things which do get working
- some of the things that Jonathan and Stephen do, I can't believe we're there already
- there's been a lot of talk online about people using Rakudo and Perl 6 to solve their problems
- things are definitely progressing
- lots of them say "Not everything works, but the progress is amazing!"
Jerry:
- your post on the Winter Scripting Games sparked a lot of activity
Patrick:
- that was the intended effect
Allison:
- mainly working on integrating patches and reviewing tickets
- concentrated on Reini Urban's install branch
- finished integrating changes to the calling conventions branch
- now we need to test that and use new features throughout the code
- speaking about Parrot this Thursday in San Francisco
- two weeks from now will speak at UC Davis
- three weeks from now at IBM's research center in New York
Jesse:
- pondering quite a bit lately
- looking for suggestions for people to take over Perl 6 coordination
- make sure projects talk to each other
- have someone moderately impartial to moderate when heads bang together
Allison:
- more like Jono Bacon's community manager role in Ubuntu
