This Week on perl5-porters (30th December 2002 / 5th January 2003)
What are the perl5-porters' new year resolutions ? You won't learn it by
reading this week's highly technical summary. But that's not the point,
is it ?
Copy constructor contract
Rick Delaney reports (bug #19582) that a copy constructor that doesn't
return a blessed reference may produce segfaults when the resulting
reference is used. As a solution, he proposes to forbid copy
constructors to return non-objects. (Currently, copy constructors can't
return non-references, but can return unblessed references.)
The bug : http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg90340.html
The fix : http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg90321.html
Simple segfault
Some good bug hunting was done for bug #19566, a simple case of
segfault, caused by this simple snippet of code (there are many
variants) :
for (\2) { $_ = <FH> }
Oddly enough, this bug seems to exist since a long time (5.003_01), but
haven't been fixed.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg90334.html
Parens in pack()
Wolfgang Laun asked a question about the semantics of parentheses in
pack() templates. Nicholas Clark confessed that '(' in pack makes his
head hurt, and frankly, I'm with him on this point. See for yourself :
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg90455.html
Link black magic
Chip Turner initiated a thread on shared libperl builds, which I don't
(frankly) want to summarize here. If you're interested in the issues in
packaging, distributing and upgrading binaries of perl, follow the link :
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg90384.html
In brief
Gisle Aas provided updates for his modules MIME::Base64 and Digest::MD5.
Hugo released a snapshot of bleadperl (the 5.9.0-to be), shortly
followed by Jarkko releasing a snapshot of maintperl (the 5.8.1-to be).
Jarkko released another snapshot at the end of the week before his
planned connectivity problems.
Nicholas Clark proposed a patch to implement copy on write for the $&
and $<DIGIT> variables. As with other copy on write implementations,
it's available only if perl is configured with the -DPERL_COPY_ON_WRITE
flag. However, this patch doesn't seem to be a significant speedup (or
slowdown).
On the performance chapter, Jarkko also sent a patch to speed up Unicode
operations.
Jarkko thrown at us an interesting link : "Someone might want to try
Splint at Perl 5 (or Parrot, for that matter) sources." (see
http://www.splint.org/).
About this summary
This summary brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez and his hurting
brain. (OK, I was obviously tired this week, I blame this bad cold I
got.) Summaries are available on http://use.perl.org/ and/or via a
mailing list, which subscription address is
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Comments and corrections are welcome.
