Work in the ng branch continues; this post is an update on some of the work I've done on a slightly broken-up Rakudo Day (things have been a tad disrupted while I've come over to England for the month).
Perhaps the most exciting bit of news is that I've done an implementation of the attribute meta-protocol. The main upshot of this is that we now don't hard-code the creation of accessors, but rather call a "compose" routine on the Attribute object - the meta-object that represents an attribute - and it does the accessor creation. Amongst other things, this opens the door for custom accessor generation, which I believe is something that many Moose extensions do, and so will be useful for Perl 6 meta-programmers. As a bonus, the Attribute class is implemented in NQP, not PIR.
I've also continued working on roles. I'm happy to say that, unlike in master, we implement the does and but operators - which do runtime mix-ins of roles - in Perl 6 now. They don't actually do much - the heavy lifting is done by the RoleToObjectApplicator class. That one is implemented in NQP, with only one small Parrot-specific bit. It feels great to be writing these bits in something higher level, and - importantly - means they're all building on a fairly small set of primitives rather than having deep magic everywhere.
In other smaller bits of news, I got the dotty form of .= working, and also implemented the .^ dotty operator too (which makes metaclass calls prettier).
All in all, I'm fairly happy with how things are shaping up. I'm hoping another Rakudo-day sized push and we'll be able to run many of the roles related tests again, but this time atop a much cleaner and more correct implementation, a large part of which is in Perl 6 (or NQP, which is a subset of Perl 6). Thanks to Vienna.pm for sponsoring this work.
