The time has clearly come to start work on Parrot's module ecosystem -- the module installer, search tool, dependency checker, and so on. We've been discussing various pieces on #parrot, #perl6, and parrot-dev for a few weeks, and a couple weeks ago we reached rough consensus. At that point, I collected all the comments and emails and wrote up a draft design document. I guess you could call that 'Day 0'.
Today I managed to commit a few hours to getting started actually implementing some of that design. It turned out that didn't happen, but I did manage to set up a project repository for the prototype and spent the rest of the time exploring NQP.
NQP stands for "Not Quite Perl 6", a (considerably) simplified variant of Perl 6 that lends itself well to optimization and clean implementation. It is one of the standard languages shipped with Parrot and generally used as a tool for creating more complex languages (such as, unsurprisingly, the Rakudo implementation of Perl 6).
Because it is shipped with Parrot, we can be confident that it will always be there, no matter what other languages the user may or may not have installed. And because it is a subset of Perl 6, it's easy to use (though a tad wordy in a few places that full Perl 6 provides heavier syntactic sugar). Thus I decided to implement the module tools using NQP.
Unfortunately, NQP is a little too simplified right now. It includes all the necessary features to implement parser actions for a compiler (the most common use for it), but this will be the first project using NQP to write fully independent command line tools. These tools are even more demanding in that they will need to work pretty extensively with platform dependencies -- from system configuration to process spawning.
Because there isn't any existing NQP code that does the kinds of things this project will need, I spent most of today exploring the boundaries of what existed in NQP already, what was missing, and how much could be filled in by borrowing magic from Rakudo. At this point, I can pull in environment variables, Parrot configuration, and OS information; and I can shell out to external commands, optionally capturing the output. That all went fairly smoothly, if slowly.
Unfortunately, I had more problems with writing OO code in NQP. It turns out that most of the OO code written in NQP creates classes implicitly or through hand-coded PIR. Even though there are class and method declarators, there appears to be no way in pure NQP to declare object attributes -- nor an obvious way to fake them using hand-coded new, BUILD, or bless.
Of course, I can always fall back to hand-coded PIR, even faking my own declarators, but there was some agreement that this is something NQP really should provide out of the box; I'll be talking with pmichaud++ about this in the coming days.
The project goal is to have at least the basic toolchain implemented and working smoothly for Parrot 2.0, in keeping with the official 2.0 vision: "Production Users". In order to have things running smoothly by then we need to get the prototype up and running soon, so that we can iterate several times before Parrot 2.0 is released. If you'd like to help, come by #parrot on irc.perl.org and ping me (japhb). See you there!
