The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 14 May 2008. Allison, Richard,
Patrick, Jerry, Will, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.
Allison:
- working on the exceptions implementation for the concurrency branch
- also the Parrot foundation
Richard:
- trying to drum up funding for the Perl 6 paupers
- something's happened along these lines
- an anonymous member of the Perl community brokered a deal with a philanthropic business acquaintance
- I put together a pitch describing what we could do productively with a donation
- the money arrived yesterday
- half of it will go toward supporting Perl 6 development in a variety of ways
- mostly direct developer granting, like Patrick's grant
- the other half is for TPF use to improve organizational capabilities internally
- there's a lot more potential for funding
- orders of magnitude more
- that'll take us over the finish line
- though TPF is not a paragon of activity and organization
- we'll use it to improve to make us more credible to the rest of the world
- and potentially more developers
- want to go from a handful of grants like this to something larger
- I'll spend the next week or so making plans
- we'd like to start getting some of that out over the next few weeks
Patrick:
- outstanding work
- you'll go down in history for this
Jerry:
- will they money go out through the grant committee?
Richard:
- I don't think so
- this will be as directed by the board
Jerry:
- is there a PR plan for spreading this news?
Richard:
- I hadn't thought of that
- I'd like ideas for helping with that
Jerry:
- it's easy to post to web sites
- it might be good to give brian d foy a heads up for TPJ, too
Richard:
- I'm trying to do similar things for Perl 5
- this particular donor had a specific interest in Perl 6
- the half of this we're using to improve TPF will help Perl 5 as well
Nicholas:
- I hope the positive feedback will encourage other people to do the same for Perl 5
- presumably they're already using it and want to contribute back
Patrick:
- busy week here
- focusing specifically on Rakudo
- helping other people hack themselves
- added fat-arrow parsing, so now that works for passing named parameters
- added signature default values
- no more crazy MMD stuff to get that working
- worked on the test suite
- started at the beginning, Synopsis 2 cleanup
- making notes for others on things to do and not to do
- tried to close out old tickets, did about 18 Parrot-only tickets
- some updates to PGE to bring in S05 changes
- Tene added placeholder parameters to Rakudo
- surprised and pleased me to see that
- he found a problem with hashes versus arrays in PCT
- I did quite a bit of work to improve PCT code generation
- substantial improvements there
- generates much nicer code
c:
- there are some speed improvements there
- they're hard to measure, but they're there
Patrick:
- we're creating many fewer elements there
- especially in places like loops
c:
- we don't have many long-running benchmarks that would demonstrate that
- if we did, you'd really notice it
Patrick:
- it's been in the back of my mind since I started writing PCT
- it makes for nicer looking PIR code, if you like PIR code
- now I'm writing some journal posts to describe this to the wider community
- I don't know if anyone saw it, but there was a Twitter post that singled out TPF for its organization for Google's Summer of Code
- Jerry should get some credit for that for Parrot
Richard:
- I've talked to Eric Wilhelm a lot over the past few weeks
- he's doing a great job
- this has been his full-time job over the past few weeks
- that's why we're not always this organized
- very seldom do we have someone who can make such a thing a full-time job
- simple matters of organization often aren't
Jerry:
- worked with Allison on research for the Parrot Foundation
- she interviewed a lawyer to help set up the incorporation
- work has been lighter this week
- spent more time on Parrot and Perl 6
- haven't had any significant commits
- began to rewrite mod_parrot's configure system for flexibility and portability
- hope to get it compiling on Windows
- shouldn't be difficult
- Patrick and I discussed making HLL type mappings available in IMCC
Patrick:
- PIR doesn't seem to have a way of finding HLL type maps
- PCT needs to move something from a register into a PMC
- equivalent types, as far as the HLL is concerned
- there doesn't appear to be a way to do that
- without the HLL person repeating the mappings in PIR
- violates DRY
Jerry:
- I think I see a way of implementing that
- the major problem is that, internally, the PMC types are still type IDs
- not string names
- I might have a short-term fix
- the long term is to get rid of type IDs internally
- it's easy enough to expose that through interp_info.pasm or something
c:
- let me know if you need help
Patrick:
- also remember that class names are not always strings
- they are now, but the won't always be
Will:
- I'll try to unstick the type ID removal branch later this week
- mostly I've been doing queue management, which is not exciting
Patrick:
- I'm excited about seeing the number go down
Will:
- we've closed an enormous number of tickets in the last week
- yet more tickets keep coming in
- what's wrong with these users?
c:
- spent some time closing bugs and applying patches
- need to go through open patches and make sure they're all closed
- probably won't make much of the Bug Day
- backported yada yada yada operators to Perl 5, waiting for someone to apply them
- managed to speed up the Rakudo-building benchmark by about 40% yesterday
- hope to get onto the concurrency implementation soon
Nicholas:
- talked to Daniel Ruoso and stuck his response on the wiki
- otherwise busy with a potential move
Patrick:
- Jerry, are you still planning to reimplement abc to use the language shell tool?
Jerry:
- yes
- I plan to update the tool to include an operator precedence parser
- not sure if I should couple those changes
Patrick:
- I'm thinking of updating the tutorial
- kjs's tutorial is great
- I just want another one
- I don't want to step on your toes
Jerry:
- I plan to make my changes
- then apply the revised tool to abc
- I'll turn my attention to that next
Patrick:
- we should knock that out pretty quickly
Jerry:
- what's your plan for this release?
Nicholas:
- are you in a position to type things from this release to last release?
- or should I ask Patrick?
- you've sped up a lot of things
Patrick:
- Rakudo gets bigger over time
- there's quite a bit more code there than there was last month
c:
- there are a couple of ways to do that
- we could plot the ratio of time per feature over the release numbers
- that's not too difficult
- otherwise, we could take the current PGE/PCT/NQP/Rakudo and run it on this month's release versus last month's release
- or run last month's toolkit on this month's Parrot
Patrick:
- I can do that
- already thinking of ways to do that
Nicholas:
- Damian was talking about negative time last year
- you guys are doing it!
c:
- the big improvement is likely in the new garbage collector
Jerry:
- Andrew and Patrick should have a race
Patrick:
- longest token matching will help languages
- that's on my agenda for later in the summer though
c:
- remember that these are only Parrot-level improvements
- we haven't even started on PIR-level improvements
- because we can't profile it easily yet
- I suspect there are plenty of trivial 10 - 20% optimizations we'll find in hotspots there
