All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Weeks 8..12 of GSoC work on Buf -- not packing it in yet

masak on 2010-08-13T22:35:51

I was reproached by my colleague because of the lack of "no cake"-style jokes in this last grant update. So what can I do to amend the situation? Firstly, let me concede that the below blog post is almost tear-inducingly boring. Secondly, let me remind you that when accosted by boring material such as that in this post, the most important thing to have is a positive outlook on life. Thank you.

The past couple of days have been really eventful. The coming couple of days probably will be, too. It seems fitting to punctuate all this eventfulness with a status-updating blog post, something that I apparently haven't gotten around to in a few weeks.

So, what's been happening?

  • In the last update, I was at a point where I needed to encode to different encodings, not just UTF-8. Tonight I had an enlightening discussion with the Parrot people, which gave all the pieces of the puzzle. Now it's just a Simple Matter of Programming. More precisely, I need to apply it to this spot in the code base.
  • By that discussion, I was once again made aware that Parrot differs between encodings and charsets. For example, utf8 is an encoding, but iso-8859-1 is a charset. It's confusing me slightly, but that's OK. I can make the code work so that both are treated as "encodings" on the Perl 6 level.
  • I got unexpected assistance from oha++, who took me aside in private discussions to discuss new wild ideas for Buf. It all culminated in a p6l thread. Oha is writing code that uses Buf for network traffic, and has been preparing a patch for making IO::Socket::INET return Bufs instead of Strs. In trying out this patch, oha++ found that some tests will never work when Bufs are used. Those tests will probably need to be rewritten.
  • During the past week or so, I've been implementing pack and unpack in a branch. I'm making steady progress, and trying to take in documentation such as Perl 5's perldoc -f pack and perlpacktut and Erlang's ei and Tcl's binary. It's a lot to take in, and I won't aim for full functionality — look, Perl 5 has 14699 tests for pack! — but rather a reasonable subset of the directives from Perl 5.

There's a lot to be said about the interplay between Perl 6's high level of abstraction and the almost reckless to-the-metal feeling of &pack/&unpack. Add to this that the "metal" in this case is Parrot, which in some regards is there to abstract away the real metal. I think the details of this interplay might well be the subject of a separate blog post. When I'm not busy finishing up the code itself. 哈哈

The hard pencils-down deadline for GSoC is on Monday. I'm pretty sure I will have tied up the remaining loose ends by then, but I also foresee a couple of fairly focused hours programming before that. Time to dig back in; see you on the other side.