Perl 6 Design Minutes for 11 February 2009

chromatic on 2009-02-24T01:22:14

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 11 February 2009. Larry, Jerry, Patrick, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

hacking symbol table support into the STD parser
so that I can tell when things have and haven't been defined
largely complete
started moving the lexical pads out to a separate file
they have more information in them
the Setting file, formerly the Prelude, is now parameterized so that other Settings can be set for the lexical settings
lots of work on various error messages associated with declaration, non-declaration, and redeclaration errors
just checked in a unification of the + and * twigils
threatened that for a long time
prototyped that in the STD parser
it seemed to work
hacked that in
now we only have the * twigil
it essentially does the contextual variables
it looks in global and process symbol tables if it doesn't find them locally
it looks in the environment only after failing to find it in global and process
it's very easy to hide that, or substitute a vetted environment table somewhere in your dynamic scope
cleaned up the definition of how environment is passed on to the subprocess
dealing with the twigil changes in the Spec
cleaning up the pseudopackage names somewhat
regularizing the setting and file scope and current compilation unit and their relationships

Patrick:

went to Frozen Perl this weekend
gave one major presentation on Perl 6
a couple of lightning talks on PCT
had a hackathon on Sunday
that went well
there's a lot of enthusiasm for Rakudo and Perl 6
Andy Lester focused on that for his keynote
lots of people talking about it outside of that
lots of people starting to look at Perl 6 again
"We're getting to an implementation"
"These features are nice"
"I'm looking forward to using this in my business"
trying to update the instructions to download and build Rakudo from its new repository
coming along more slowly than I'd like
noticed at the hackathon that invoking Rakudo with the Parrot command line — parrot perl6.pbc — is confusing for folks
Parrot's not in a common location they can get to it from
we'll try to focus more on the executable form
people can understand that more
noticed that pbc_to_exe took an inordinately long time to do its work
hacked on that, and the new version is a lot faster
learned a lot about IO in Parrot
tweaking the build scripts for Rakudo
plan to do more of the same
will write up more documentation, READMEs, guides, blog posts, etc

Jerry:

interested in the work on the Setting
might work with one of the S19 options I've toyed with
-E to include an environment variable
can be generalized into a one-liner to add a setting
had some minor updates to S19
don't have the split/comb update quite right yet
been fighting with Parrot's Windows compatibility through changes in the config system
discovering some things this week about static and shared library linking
working toward a solution there
started creating an Ubuntu VM for distribution to interested hackers
has all sorts of Perl 6-related projects
Pugs, Rakudo, Parrot, November, Apache, mod_parrot
VMWare image that should fit on a 16 GB thumb drive
will make that online
should make it easier for people who want to hack on Rakudo to do so
provided we can set up tools to manage and update these distributions

Nicholas:

Jerry:

I don't think it will
that's how big I have it now
it can probably be smaller
I'm not familiar enough with a minimal install of Ubuntu with enough space for GCC and the build tools

Nicholas:

Jerry:

Patrick:

Patrick:

Jerry:

want to give Jesse credit for Prophet and SD, which syncs with RT, Hiveminder, and Trac
offline access to bug queues and TODO lists
it's nice to travel to a venue and then sync so everyone sees how productive you are when you're not connected
going to put that in the Perl 6 dev VM

Patrick: