Perl 6 Summary for the week ending 20030727
Welcome to another in the ongoing series of Perl 6 summaries in which
your faintly frazzled summarizer attempts to find a native speaker of
Esperanto to translate this opening paragraph in honour of the huge
amount of money (1371 Euros) raised for TPF during the YAPC::Europe
auction, when the official language of both London.pm and Paris.pm's
websites were auctioned off as one lot. Somewhat to the surprise of
everyone, the winning bid was for Esperanto. As Jouke Visser just
commented on IRC, the price was well worth paying just to see the looks
of panic on the faces of Mark Fowler, Leon Brocard and other London.pm
worthies as the price of keeping the website English (and changing
Paris.pm's website to English in the process) shot up beyond the reach
of their collective pocket.
Meanwhile, we'll return to English and start with the internals list as
usual.
Events
Junior reporter: Mr Macmillan, what caused your greatest difficulties
in your time as UK Prime Minister?
Macmillan: Events dear boy, events.
Whilst I'm not sure Dan would fully agree with Macmillan, there was a
certain amount of concern about Events (well, event handling). Damien
Neil is still convinced that asynchronous IO is the Wrong Thing, but he
hasn't convinced Dan, and (in this at least) it's Dan's opinion that
counts.
http://xrl.us/nj3
http://xrl.us/nj4 -- Dan ditches the cranky reply
Memory system issues
Jürgen Bömmels' work on the aforementioned Asynchronous IO system means
that he's been getting rather more involved with the internals of
Parrot's memory allocation and Garbage Collection system than he
intended. He had a few questions, which Dan answered.
http://xrl.us/nj5
Splitting core.ops
Brent Dax announced that the patch splitting core.ops into a slightly
more logical set of smaller files has been committed. This occasioned a
small flurry of discussion and a smaller flurry of patches to ensure
that all the new .ops files had their associated documentation files
built.
http://xrl.us/nj6
Parrot docs translated to Japanese
Koichi Sasada, a Japanese university student has translated the Parrot
Primer into Japanese and put it on his website. He wanted to know if he
could publicise the translation. This summary is (at least in part) his
answer.
http://xrl.us/nj7
http://xrl.us/nj8 -- In English
http://xrl.us/nj9 -- In Japanese
PMC methods
Luke Palmer can't stop thinking of other ideas as he works on
implementing lazy PMCs. His latest idea relates to accessing methods on
PMCs without having to generate scads of new opcodes (Personally, I
don't see what's wrong with using the object stuff for getting both PMC
vtable (C) methods and methods that are implemented in Parrot itself.)
Luke proposed a few ops which he reckons will solve the problem.
http://xrl.us/nka
objects.t Failures
Simon Glover tracked down a problem with the objects.t test file that
had been failing on some, but not all platforms. It turns out that the
class_hash wasn't included as part of the root set, which meant that the
garbage collector could try to reclaim it before it got used. Which is
bad. He supplied a two line patch to fix the problem. Which is good.
Dan made with the D'oh!, commenting that he'd known he'd forgotten
something.
http://xrl.us/nkb
RFC: Cleaning up the ParrotIOLayer API
Jürgen Böemmels has reached a point in his redoing of the Parrot IO
subsystem that he wanted to remove and/or rename several of the old
methods so he posted an RFC explaining what he intended to do and asked
for comments. Gregor N. Purdy had some comments, mostly to do with the
data structures involved (with particular reference to strings) but
other than that there has been no further comment.
http://xrl.us/nkc
Parrot Emits an Executable
Daniel Grunblatt checked in a patch to make parrot generate native
executables. There are caveats about what must be done in order to get a
working executable and the original patch needed to have a few wrinkles
ironed out, but this looks like a fantastic start to me.
http://xrl.us/nkd
Approaching Python
Michael Wallace wondered about the issue of compiling python to parrot.
He wondered if it would be possible to make use of the existing Python
compiler module which generates python bytecode from a parse tree. He
wondered if it'd be worthwhile modifying it to generate parrot bytecode.
The discussion which followed covered various options for handling
Python code, ranging from bytecode transformation to translating the
source code into Perl 6 (which is probably the least likely to save Dan
from pie).
I'm not sure if a particular approach was chosen, but Michael
