The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 10 December 2008. Allison, Jerry, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.
Jerry:
- preparing to release a draft of the Perl 6 command line specification
- working on that today
- having trouble checking out Pugs repo on Windows
- will open that up for questions soon
- Patrick and Jonathan did a lot of work on Rakudo this week
- added some important features that make it feel like Perl
- list assignment and slices now work
- reduction operators
- inline PIR code
- Jonathan added hyperoperators and default values for class and object attributes
- some local Perl Mongers groups, Wellington and Portland, are doing Rakudo hacking sessions this month
- it's an excellent time to start playing with Rakudo
- about 4900 spectests pass
- we hope to reach 5000 by the Tuesday release
Allison:
- at the Ubuntu Developers Summit
- finished the IO branch
- Jerry helped greatly closing the Windows IO bugs remotely over IRC
- had someone compile Parrot on 64-bit Intrepid last night
- had a segfault there
- looked like an exception problem
Jerry:
- looked like an optimized Parrot, which has known problems on 64-bit
Allison:
- if we can get that fixed soon, we can get some Ubuntu help
- they have a service called PPA
- you upload a source package and it builds packages for multiple versions and architectures of Ubuntu
- we can have people testing nightly package builds
- people can subscribe to that build as a normal package repository
- we can do that even before we're in an official Ubuntu distribution
- I just have to set up the beginning bits
- should have that set up before next week's release
- working on Reini's install branch
- almost have the relevant bits committed to a fresh branch
c:
- reviewed Numbers PDD for Parrot
- needs some more thinking; bigint and bigfloat in particular
- concerned about autopromotion
- added some optimizations
- now we're at Rung 2 in Coverity Scan
- going to fix some bugs this weekend
- looking at other optimizations and memory management techniques
- agreed to manage Jonathan's role Hague Grant
- I'm concerned about spending only a month revamping the GC
Allison:
- the plan is only adding tri-color incremental
- it's going to be a conservative change
Nicholas:
- thanks to Leon, I've been watching python-dev
- they released Python 3.0 last week
- many things seem relevant to the Perl 5/Perl 6 transition
- they seem to have the same frustration that Perl has (and the whole world)
- despite many release candidates, they have a lot of problems reported only after general release
- lots of questions about which libraries work with which versions
- how to write software for the new version
- basic advocacy trying to keep people from thinking that 3.0 is stillborn due to libraries
- they made a big change to make everything Unicode
- this goes very wrong when you expect all filenames are UTF-8
- on some Japanese systems, some names are in UTF-8 and some are in Shift-JIS
- if you iterate over a directory, invalid UTF-8 names are silently ignored
- they're currently debating how to fix this
- there's the potential for scary data loss
- we should learn from their solution
- they haven't thrashed out one yet
- the problem is reconciling treating these as UTF-8 strings versus text the user can interact with
Allison:
- I was in packaging discussions yesterday
- Python 3.0 is a huge change like Perl 6 in that aspect
Jesse:
- yes, there are backwards-incompatible changes
- fundamentally the language is still the same
Allison:
- that's what we tell people about Perl 6
- you just can't run all of your old code on the new system
Jesse:
- Jonathan's Hague grant is now approved
