While most of what we discussed last week about perl 6 doesn't
directly impact parrot, there are a few things that will. I'm pretty
late as it is, so I figured I'd give a quick summary before digging
through the pending p6i mail and dealing with these in depth. In
order:
*) We need to get Leo's concerns about string reusability dealt with.
(Which, strictly speaking, wasn't discussed but it's been hanging too
long) We're generating too many new strings. Fooey.
*) The vtable split needs to be defined and implemented. I'd like
some macros to access the vtable entries themselves, since there may
be a number of structural changes and I don't want to have to keep
redoing the code every time some element shifts from one spot to
another.
*) I'd like to get access to pmc elements done via macros as well--I
think it's time to split PMCs into pieces, since we're definitely
trashing the cache in the common case with things we don't commonly
need. (Like the metadata, thread, and GC stuff) PMCs are 40 bytes on
my PPC system. Too much cache fluff.
*) We're going to have to maintain properties on both PMCs and the
values in PMCs. I'm not sure yet how to do this without adding a
second property pointer, which we may end up doing. I'm not sure yet
*) multimethod dispatch became much less important, which is both
good and bad. I'll get to that later
*) We (that is, us) get to define the event, thread, and IO systems,
which we should do at some point if I want to avoid being the target
of a pie. (Though I'm quite willing to be one if it'll encourage
folks. Including me :)
*) There's going to be a bunch of named argument stuff that we should
(though don't have to) put support in for. Perl 6 is going to make
heavy use of them.
*) One change to the calling convention--optionally passing in the
name of the sub/method you're invoking. This is for autoloadish
things where we may be making a call to foo, but really got
GENERIC_FALLBACK_METHOD or something.
I think that's the big things. I'll start digging through the list
now to see what was up while I was gone. (So prepare for old and
stale answers :)
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
