So I'm in Zurich airport and (finally) working toward the slides for my talk, cheduled to go on air in 24 hours.
I'm adopting the Takahashi method, which basically means doing six lightning talks in a row, and somehow string them all back together in the end. It's fun and very challenging...
The State of the Onion 9 talk transcript is quite entertaining. I hope to run into other fun amplifiers in ICFP, so the two weeks after that can be optimised to get Pugs 6.2.10 (or even 6.28.0) out in a useful shape in time for Euro OSCON.
Perl6-MetaModel News
Role work is now (mostly) complete. We still need more tests, and there is still more Class and Role integration planned but not yet implemented.
To exercise the meta-model I have ported chromatic's Perl 6 version of Test::Builder (complete with tests) to the meta-model. The translation was fairly seamless, and even used the meta-model based package system instead of Perl 5 packages.
You can see it here and you will find the Perl6 code in the POD documentation for reference.
Blondie wants You (pointing finger) to give it more backends
Blondie is a side project whose purpose is to prototype some approaches towards compiling the dynamic/static conglomerate that is Perl 6 into something that runs efficiently and portably, in as little effort as possible.
Blondie needs as many backends as possible as early as possible to stress it's design.
Blondie is already interpreted in perl, and partially compiled to C (supported by a primitive type inferrencer), but we want more!
The backends we're still interested in are:
Parrot and PIR
This is what Perl 6 will run on by default, so we better support it
Other virtual machines, e.g. LLVM, Ruby's YARV, the JVM through Jasmin, C--
For two reasons: Running Perl 6 on foreign runtimes designed for high level languages Learning what VMs look like when targeted uniformly
GCC's GENERIC
Although we're already harnessing GCC with the C backend, making a GCC frontend for Blondie has two interesting aspects: it's higher level than a VM, so this illustrates AST conversion, and it requires completely manual memory management
Other interpreted backends, e.g. JavaScript
Interpreting approaches are by far the quickest way to get Blondie to run on strange platforms. This will stress the way the shared prelude is handled.
Mock backends
Harsh environments for a dynamic language, like no IO, hard real time (all builtins which cannot be realtime are masked from the prelude), etc.
Please see the todo file for more tasks under perl5/Blondie/TODO in the pugs repository.
