I wanted to get a little rest and seeing friends in this weekend alongside helping move ng along - that is, the branch where we're re-building Rakudo atop of the new regex engine. Thus I took a Rakudo day and split it up over the two days, yesterday and today, so I could get a nice combination of work and play. Here's some of what I've been up to; I expect Patrick will blog later on today some of the outstanding work he has been doing too.
I guess the work we've done over this weekend could be divided into two overlapping tracks. Patrick has taken on a lot of the language fundamentals and had a key focus on us being able to run Test.pm again, which will open up the rest of the sepctest suite to us. It's currently looking fairly likely that we'll reach that milestone within the next 24 hours, which is amazing progress. I've also been doing some things that will help us on the way to that, but my focus has on getting some key infrastructure in again so we can soon start bringing parts of the Perl 6 setting back into play.
One of the things I had to get back in place was type name handling, so we can differentiate our types from our other names. That was a lot neater this time, since it could just go in much more STD-ish as an assertion - written in NQP rather than PIR (there's a lot of this now). After that, it was easy to get typed signatures parsing again. I fixed up our name parsing along the way a bit too - the NQP grammar did something simpler, whereas we needed something a bit more complex for Perl 6.
One of the big changes we've had in from the start - in order to bring ourselves in line with the spec - is that subs are lexically scoped rather than package scoped by default. After some pondering, I realized that we could handle lexical multis in a far, far nicer way than we had been doing in the past, so I got that implemented. In fact, I'm now expecting I can follow the same pattern for methods too. It's a lot, lot cleaner than what we were doing before, and additionally avoids a lot of start-up reblessing, which was one of our big startup costs before. We really are taking the opportunity to apply our past experience and the new grammar engine features to build the grammars actions up in a much neater way, and I'm really happy with the results so far.
One of the things Patrick has been working to get in place is the Parcel data structure. Along with that, we've been reshaping our approach to issues like flattening. I've mostly been involved with that at the level of discussing the approach with Patrick, and he's led the implementation charge on it. Today he hit on the need for a small tweak to the method dispatcher, which was familiar ground for me, so I got it patched up. A silly fail on my part later, it was all working rather nicely. Finally, I got some pieces of roles patched back in to the new build.
One thing I've been preparing for is getting our class and role declaration support back in place. I'm planning to approach it in a rather different way than we have been up until now, the motivation partly being neater and more maintainable code, but also getting us on track to handle custom meta-classes. I'm not saying we'll actually have those when the ng branch lands, but equally I'm aiming for us to be a whole bunch closer. The other big difference in approach here is that I'm aiming for us to be able to keep a lot of the package information trivially introspectable during the building up of the class or role, which will make some things much easier and better encapsulated. Further, we can also keep that information around for assisting a future optimizer/type checker. (As an aside, I've been arranging signature things in a similar way during the course of my signatures grant. I guess the general principle is that while PAST is pretty much sufficient for expressing the semantics of the program, sometimes it's desirable to keep some higher level information around for entities that don't have a specific type of PAST node dedicated to them - mostly because languages tend to care about them in very different ways, so they don't belong in PAST anyway.)
Thanks to Vienna.pm for funding my work at this important stage in Rakudo's development.
