This is the Perl 6 Internals correction summary, for the weeks of 2006-02-13 through 2006-02-28, by Ann Barcomb.
Summary updatesThank you to everyone who took the time to point out that I had accidently used February 2003 rather than 2006 for the internals section. This is the actual summary for February 2006.
Due to the comments received on short URLs, I have decided to use the originals, as I also prefer them.
Internals (Parrot-Porters)This mailing list has been previously called perl6-internals. It is now known as parrot-porters, but the perl6-internals name will remain as an alias for now.
Delayed releaseLeopold Toetsch announced the delay of the next release. The German Perl workshop and a hackathon with Audrey Tang were responsible.
Bug: PGE - truncating PIR code generated by p6ruleAllison pushed some code and a test which isolates a failing test in punie so that others could aid in debugging. Joshua Isom reported success on two platforms, but noted other problems he encountered, which Allison recognized as known Parrot::Test bugs. Some debugging took place.
Addressing unowned bugsJoshua Hoblitt requested that people with RT privileges spend a few minutes on the queue attempting to resolve a few bugs and wondered if RT could be configured to leave bugs marked as 'new' until they are owned.
Request for a clean bailout mechanismIn December, Joshua Hoblitt created a ticket [perl #37930] requesting a clean way for a step to signal a failure. As of February's r11568, all configuration steps were modified.
Param count mismatch errors enabledLeopold Toetsch posted that param count mismatches now throw exceptions, but result/return count mismatches are still not checked. He included a list of failing tests from r11570 which were affected by this change.
Better gdb supportLeopold Toetsch changed the syntax for registers in r11581.
Punie test failures in set_node method on Solaris/SPARCAllison Randal passed on a reported failure on Solaris/SPARC [perl #38584].
In another thread, Andy Dougherty looked into the problem and gave his test results.
Trace improvementsLeopold Toetsch gave a summary of some recent trace improvements. They were as follows: trace output runs through a dedicated debug interpreter, the output has been beautified, and tracing in to a file is faster.
Test failures with 'long long' on i386/linuxAndy Dougherty reported that this failure persists if one uses 64-bit opcodes on a 32-bit system. He was not especially concerned about the failure as he had explicitly created the situation in order to test the bug in its original context.
Deprecated PMCsIn January, Leopold Toetsch indicated that FloatvalArray and StringArray would be removed soon. As of r11602, they were removed.
Future JIT compiler improvementsLeopold Toetsch related a short list of desired JIT compiler improvements from [perl #38593].
ReleaseLeopold Toetsch announced an upcoming release and put a code freeze on feature changes.
Later he started releasing 0.4.2 and blocked all checkins.
And finally, the release was complete.
WRT *BooleanArrayLeopold Toetsch commented that the resizeable variant is broken, and had some comments on what *BooleanArray should support. Matt Fowles agreed with most of the *BooleanArray reductions, while Bob Rogers had some questions. Bernhard Schmalhofer also spoke up. After seeing the support for the methods, Leopold Toetsch decided they should remain.
Configure dependencies fix bug closedJoshua Hoblitt closed a ticket [perl #31138] which was not addressed and was no longer applicable.
Question on t/pmc/array.t with a negative length to an arrayKarl Forner asked a question about list_set_length, which puzzled him by accepting negative sizes. He requested a pointer to documentation describing the behavior of the routine.
Deprecated --expnetwork in Configure.plIn October,
Will Coleda noted that --expnetwork from Configure.pl was an unused option which should probably be removed [perl #37388].
More recently,
Joshua Hoblitt requested clarification and Leopold Toetsch agreed with the removal.
Joshua Hoblitt inquired as to whether [perl #31156] was worth implementing. Leopold Toetsch asked how to add CFLAGS from a perl Configure.pl command, and Joshua replied.
Truncating results of factorial test on Parrot examples pageBack in September 2005, James Ghofulpo asked in [perl #31980] if the factorial example was meant to truncate results. Bernhard Schmalhofer confirmed that he got incorrect results running the example. Leopold Toetsch noted that most of the examples are outdated. There was a call to fix the factorials, and in February Joshua Hoblitt asked what had become of the example. Leopold Toetsch replied that it had been removed because it was broken.
undef != undefAs long ago as December 2004, Simon Glover created a ticket [perl #33603] noting that undef != undef. Leopold Toetsch tried to explain why undefs have to be distinct currently. A patch was proposed, but rejected, and in February Joshua Hoblitt asked for some resolution on the issue.
Ways to helpKarl Forner, a mailing list subscriber, expressed interest in helping to develop Perl6 and Parrot and asked what he could do. He was welcomed by Bernhard Schmalhofer, who proposed a starting place. Allison Randal responded to the suggestion of a FAQ for contributors by asking if Karl could start by making one.
Questions with building parrot-0.4.1 on Win32Sisyphus asked if there was an appropriate place for asking questions relating to building Parrot, and then asked some questions relating to a Win32 build. Jonathan Worthington confirmed that this was the right list and offered suggestions. Nick Glencross also offered advice.
m4.pm versus M4.pm causes problems on case-insensitive filesystemsChris Dolan reported [perl #38604] that Mac OS X had a problem with these two files. Bernhard Schmalhofer indicated that this was due to an svn move, which caused problems with svn update on case-insensitive filesystems.
Big steps for LuaFrancois Perrad reported that Lua on Parrot took some large steps forward.
Linking in docsKarl Forner believed that the documentation created by 'make html' were more useful than the documents on the parrotcode website. He asked a bit about the linking process, and Will Coleda answered.
Input/Output encoding filtersSteve Gunnell recapped that back in December he had a question about UTF-8 I/O. This led to some thoughts and a proposal on encoding filters. Leopold Toetsch and others offered comments.
Subversion server upgradesRobert Spier announced some downtime for the subversion server.
Question on namespaces and classesLeopold Toetsch asked for some thoughts on his proposals dealing with namespaces and classes. Jonathan Worthington and Chip Salzenberg replied.
NamespacesMatt Diephouse posted a much-awaited namespace specification draft and requested comments. He received plenty.
Announcement: Amber for parrot 0.4.2 (Argument)Roger Browne announced this release.
Applied patchesBrad Bowman submitted a patch [perl #38476] to normalize indentation in nativecall.pl.
Andy Dougherty suggested cutting cutting the memory use in half [perl #38577] because his system PANICs from the RAM allocation request. The patch was applied, but it was noted that there was a suspected bug in the ResizeableBooleanArray PMC.
Andy Dougherty was not satisfied with DETAIL_MEMORY_DEBUG in src/memory.c [perl #38576] when he tried to use it to debug an out of memory PANIC. He modified it to use STDERR instead of STDOUT and put in a guard against calling free(0). Leopold Toetsch complimented the quality of Andy's patches and told him to just apply them in the future.
In January, Bob Rogers proposed that Exception_Handler inherit from Continuations [perl #38348]. Leopold Toetsch applied the patch in r11379. Discussion continued until mid-February, and there were addition commits: r11616, and r11612.
Bob Rogers proposed a patch. Leopold Toetsch clarified how multiple get_params work with tailcalls and said the patch was okay, but there is no record of it being applied.
In [perl #38598], chromatic noted that some modifications were needed to bring documentation and tests up-to-date. He applied some patches (11755, 11756 and 11758).
chromatic recruited me at YAPC::NA 2006, and Jesse Vincent proposed this task. Audrey Tang helped me to get started. She also deserves a belated thank-you for her effort in finishing the previous edition, as does Yuval Kogman.
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Send complaints and comments about this summary to Ann Barcomb, kudra@domaintje.com.
See also