I'm finally setting the land in order, with aid from a richly alive #perl6. Together we fixed and TODO'ed some 400+ failed subtests today, with about the same number to go tomorrow, before we can release 6.2.10 in good conscience.
Happily, leo has become a #perl6 resident; with his help, we regained compatibility with Parrot 0.3.0's new calling conventions, and rules support via PGE again works. The new calling conventions are much saner; chip/leo have done a wonderful job. They are working on named parameters, lexical pads and variable-sized register frames for 0.3.1, which could be the first Parrot that Pugs can seriously target to.
Talked with Stevan about MM2, and we both agreed that Ruby-style singleton classes -- I mean eigenclasses -- is a saner way than this arbitrary distinction of class methods and instance methods. The user-visible API (aka metaobject protocol) would remain the same, but the internal dispatcher would be much easier to reason about.
After fixing the aforementioned arbitrary dispatch in the default runcore, brentdax's Cipher suite passed all tests. It's a nice demonstration of multi-paradigmic module API; it supports functional, OO and procedural modes of operation.
Following yesterday's Parrot Sketch (which finally appeared on Planet Six), nothingmuch volunteered to parse the rules tests into specification-based Test::Base tests, so we can move them all into the Parrot tree where it belongs.
So, things are looking good for 6.2.10; we still need to solve installation for perl5/, and I'd like to integrate Pugs.cabal for libpugs.o support as well.
After 6.2.10, the push for 6.28.0 will be done roughly by taking the PIL compilation backend, write a new container/metamodel runcore in Haskell to make sure it works correctly, improve the intermediate language until it hits what we needs for PIL2, and adjust js/p5/parrot backend accordingly.
Two months is an extremely long period between two releases; thanks for all lambdacamels for getting it into a fine shape, largely in my absence. It looks like -Ofun is a worthwhile optimization after all: I'm happy to rejoin the fun, and even happier to see new committers around. geoffb promised to capture some related discussions in his weblog tomorrow; I'm looking forward to see it. Ciao!
