The Perl 6 Internals correction summary for the weeks of 2006-02-13 through
2006-02-28
Summary updates
Thank you to everyone who took the time to point out that I had
accidently used February 2003 rather than 2006 for the internals
section. This is the actual summary for February 2006.
Due to the comments received on short URLs, I have decided to use the
originals, as I also prefer them.
Internals (Parrot-Porters)
This mailing list has been previously called perl6-internals. It is now
known as parrot-porters, but the perl6-internals name will remain as an
alias for now.
Delayed release <http://xrl.us/oyzw>
Leopold Toetsch announced the delay of the next release. The German
Perl workshop and a hackathon with Audrey Tang were responsible.
Bug: PGE - truncating PIR code generated by p6rule <http://xrl.us/oyzx>
Allison pushed some code and a test which isolates a failing test in
punie so that others could aid in debugging. Joshua Isom reported
success on two platforms, but noted other problems he encountered,
which Allison recognized as known Parrot::Test bugs. Some debugging
took place.
Addressing unowned bugs <http://xrl.us/oyzy>
Joshua Hoblitt requested that people with RT privileges spend a few
minutes on the queue attempting to resolve a few bugs and wondered if
RT could be configured to leave bugs marked as 'new' until they are
owned.
Request for a clean bailout mechanism <http://xrl.us/oyzz>
In December, Joshua Hoblitt created a ticket [perl #37930]
<http://xrl.us/oyz2> requesting a clean way for a step to signal a
failure. As of February's r11568, all configuration steps were
modified.
Param count mismatch errors enabled <http://xrl.us/oyz3>
Leopold Toetsch posted that param count mismatches now throw
exceptions, but result/return count mismatches are still not checked.
He included a list of failing tests from r11570 which were affected by
this change.
Better gdb support <http://xrl.us/oyz4>
Leopold Toetsch changed the syntax for registers in r11581.
Punie test failures in set_node method on Solaris/SPARC
<http://xrl.us/oyz5>
Allison Randal passed on a reported failure on Solaris/SPARC [perl
#38584] <http://xrl.us/oyz6>.
In another thread <http://xrl.us/oyz7>, Andy Dougherty looked into the
problem and gave his test results.
Trace improvements <http://xrl.us/oyz8>
Leopold Toetsch gave a summary of some recent trace improvements. They
were as follows: trace output runs through a dedicated debug
interpreter, the output has been beautified, and tracing in to a file
is faster.
Test failures with 'long long' on i386/linux <http://xrl.us/oyz9>
Andy Dougherty reported that this failure persists if one uses 64-bit
opcodes on a 32-bit system. He was not especially concerned about the
failure as he had explicitly created the situation in order to test the
bug in its original context.
Deprecated PMCs <http://xrl.us/oy2a>
In January, Leopold Toetsch indicated that FloatvalArray and
StringArray would be removed soon. As of r11602, they were removed.
Future JIT compiler improvements <http://xrl.us/oy2b>
Leopold Toetsch related a short list of desired JIT compiler
improvements from [perl #38593] <http://xrl.us/oy2c>.
Release <http://xrl.us/oy2d>
Leopold Toetsch announced an upcoming release and put a code freeze on
feature changes.
Later he started releasing 0.4.2 <http://xrl.us/oy2e> and blocked all
checkins.
And finally, the release was complete <http://xrl.us/oy2f>.
WRT *BooleanArray <http://xrl.us/oy2g>
Leopold Toetsch commented that the resizeable variant is broken, and
had some comments on what *BooleanArray should support. Matt Fowles
agreed with most of the *BooleanArray reductions, while Bob Rogers had
some questions. Bernhard Schmalhofer also spoke up. After seeing the
support for the methods, Leopold Toetsch decided they should remain.
Configure dependencies fix bug closed <http://xrl.us/oy2h>
Joshua Hoblitt closed a ticket [perl #31138] <http://xrl.us/oy2i> which
was not addressed and was no longer applicable.
Question on t/pmc/array.t with a negative length to an array
<http://xrl.us/oy2j>
Karl Forner asked a question about list_set_length, which puzzled him
by accepting negative sizes. He requested a pointer to documentation
describing the behavior of the routine.
Deprecated --expnetwork in Configure.pl <http://xrl.us/oy2k>
In October, Will Coleda noted that --expnetwork from Configure.pl was
an unused option which should probably be removed [perl #37388]
<http://xrl.us/oy2m>. More recently, Joshua Hoblitt requested
clarification and Leopold Toetsch agreed with the removal.
Performance-adding profiling build options <http://xrl.us/oy2n>
Joshua Hoblitt inquired as to whether [perl #31156]
<http://xrl.us/oy2o> was worth implementing. Leopold Toetsch asked how
to add CFLAGS from a perl Configure.pl command, and Joshua replied.
Truncating results of factorial test on Parrot examples page
<http://xrl.us/oy2p>
Back in September 2005, James Ghofulpo asked in [perl #31980]
<http://xrl.us/oy2q> if the factorial example was meant to truncate
results. Bernhard Schmalhofer confirmed that he got incorrect results
running the example. Leopold Toetsch noted that most of the examples
are outdated. There was a call to fix the factorials, and in February
Joshua Hoblitt asked what had become of the example. Leopold Toetsch
replied that it had been removed because it was broken.
undef != undef <http://xrl.us/oy2r>
As long ago as December 2004, Simon Glover created a ticket [perl
#33603] <http://xrl.us/oy2s> noting that undef != undef. Leopold
Toetsch tried to explain why undefs have to be distinct currently. A
patch was proposed, but rejected, and in February Joshua Hoblitt asked
for some resolution on the issue.
Ways to help <http://xrl.us/oy2t>
Karl Forner, a mailing list subscriber, expressed interest in helping
to develop Perl6 and Parrot and asked what he could do. He was welcomed
by Bernhard Schmalhofer, who proposed a starting place. Allison Randal
responded to the suggestion of a FAQ for contributors by asking if Karl
could start by making one.
Questions with building parrot-0.4.1 on Win32 <http://xrl.us/oy2u>
Sisyphus asked if there was an appropriate place for asking questions
relating to building Parrot, and then asked some questions relating to
a Win32 build. Jonathan Worthington confirmed that this was the right
list and offered suggestions. Nick Glencross also offered advice.
m4.pm versus M4.pm causes problems on case-insensitive filesystems
<http://xrl.us/oy2v>
Chris Dolan reported [perl #38604] <http://xrl.us/oy2w> that Mac OS X
had a problem with these two files. Bernhard Schmalhofer indicated that
this was due to an svn move, which caused problems with svn update on
case-insensitive filesystems.
Big steps for Lua <http://xrl.us/oy2x>
Francois Perrad reported that Lua on Parrot took some large steps
forward.
Linking in docs <http://xrl.us/oy2y>
Karl Forner believed that the documentation created by 'make html' were
more useful than the documents on the parrotcode website. He asked a
bit about the linking process, and Will Coleda answered.
Input/Output encoding filters <http://xrl.us/oy2z>
Steve Gunnell recapped that back in December he had a question about
UTF-8 I/O. This led to some thoughts and a proposal on encoding
filters. Leopold Toetsch and others offered comments.
Subversion server upgrades <http://xrl.us/oy22>
Robert Spier announced some downtime for the subversion server.
Question on namespaces and classes <http://xrl.us/oy23>
Leopold Toetsch asked for some thoughts on his proposals dealing with
namespaces and classes. Jonathan Worthington and Chip Salzenberg
replied.
Namespaces <http://xrl.us/oy24>
Matt Diephouse posted a much-awaited namespace specification draft and
requested comments. He received plenty.
Announcement: Amber for parrot 0.4.2 (Argument) <http://xrl.us/oy25>
Roger Browne announced this release.
Applied patches
* Tabs removed in nativecall.pl <http://xrl.us/oy26>
Brad Bowman submitted a patch [perl #38476] <http://xrl.us/oy27> to
normalize indentation in nativecall.pl.
* Reduce memory consumption of t/pmc/resizeablebooleanarray_17.pasm
<http://xrl.us/oy28>
Andy Dougherty suggested cutting cutting the memory use in half [perl
#38577] <http://xrl.us/oy29> because his system PANICs from the RAM
allocation request. The patch was applied, but it was noted that
there was a suspected bug in the ResizeableBooleanArray PMC.
* DETAIL_MEMORY_DEBUG changes <http://xrl.us/oy3a>
Andy Dougherty was not satisfied with DETAIL_MEMORY_DEBUG in
src/memory.c [perl #38576] <http://xrl.us/oy3b> when he tried to use
it to debug an out of memory PANIC. He modified it to use STDERR
instead of STDOUT and put in a guard against calling free(0). Leopold
Toetsch complimented the quality of Andy's patches and told him to
just apply them in the future.
* Accept return values via a continuation <http://xrl.us/oy3c>
In January, Bob Rogers proposed that Exception_Handler inherit from
Continuations [perl #38348] <http://xrl.us/oy3d>. Leopold Toetsch
applied the patch in r11379. Discussion continued until mid-February,
and there were addition commits: r11616, and r11612.
* Param count mismatch errors and tail-calling a continuation
<http://xrl.us/oy3e>
Bob Rogers proposed a patch. Leopold Toetsch clarified how multiple
get_params work with tailcalls and said the patch was okay, but there
is no record of it being applied.
* PIR examples, libraries and tests migrated to new subroutine
attributes <http://xrl.us/oy3f>
In [perl #38598] <http://xrl.us/oy3g>, chromatic noted that some
modifications were needed to bring documentation and tests
up-to-date. He applied some patches (11755, 11756 and 11758).
Acknowledgments
chromatic recruited me at YAPC::NA 2006, and Jesse Vincent proposed
this task. Audrey Tang helped me to get started. She also deserves a
belated thank-you for her effort in finishing the previous edition, as
does Yuval Kogman.
If you appreciate Perl, consider contributing to the Perl Foundation
<http://donate.perlfoundation.org> to help support the development of
Perl.
Send complaints and comments about this summary to Ann Barcomb,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
See also
* Perl Foundation activities <http://blog.perlfoundation.org>
* Perl 6 Development <http://dev.perl.org/perl6>
* Planet Perl Six <http://planetsix.perl.org/perl6>
