Two and a half years ago, Fotango announced their sponsorship of the Perl
6 effort, in the form of the "Ponie" project to port the Perl 5 runtime to
the Parrot Virtual Machine. For the past year, Nicholas Clark has worked
as the pumpking for Ponie as part of his work for Fotango. He's recently
moved on from Fotango and it's time for Ponie to do so as well. We're
currently interviewing for a new pumpking to take over his role.
The Ponie pumpking needs to manage the route we take to get the Ponie
source code from where it is now to its eventual goal: a Perl 5 runtime
fully integrated with the Parrot virtual machine.
You won't start from nothing. Nick and Artur Bergman before him have
developed a plan to get us to the glorious future and have made a
significant dent in that plan, but there's still a huge amount to do.
You'll need to be able to work with the existing plan and expand and
revise it as necessary, based on feedback and discoveries made while
working through the current tasks.
Ponie is an open source project. While you'll likely be doing a lot of
the heavy lifting, you also need to be able to nurture the community
and implementation. Contributors will be submitting patches. You'll
need to work with them to refine their patches and recruit some of them
as core committers.
This is primarily a C hacking role rather than a Perl hacking role. (That
is, you'll be coding Perl, not coding /in/ Perl.) You absolutely need
a good working knowledge of C and would be well-served to have some
experience managing large projects written in C. And yes, an intimate
knowledge of Perl's internals would definitely come in handy.
There's one thing about Ponie that might really appeal to you if you
have a pretty good handle on Perl 5's internals. Ponie is the perfect
opportunity to clean up and refactor the guts you hate most. It's a huge
refactoring project and you'll have more than a little freedom to make
things faster, cleaner, saner, more maintainable and generally _better_.
If you're interested in being the next Ponie pumpking, please submit a
brief bio to [EMAIL PROTECTED] We won't consider applications
posted publicly.
Over the coming weeks, Nicholas Clark and I will work to pick his
successor. Nick and I look forward to hearing from you.
Jesse
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