Older blog entries for chromatic (starting at number 469)

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 24 March 2010

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 17 March 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • clarified that nearly all normal operators autothread, including === and eqv
  • specced the \| parcel parameter syntax
  • documented that R metaoperator does not change associativity
  • clarified that trusts traits do not extend to child classes, and moritz++ specced it
  • in STD, we now suppress spurious errors from badinfix lookahead (and react more accurately to bogus terms)
  • now put the error location pointer before a bad infix, not after
  • we no longer assume missing block punctuation is always semi or comma, but keep them as a suggestion
  • missing punctuation message now points before any whitespace
  • awesomified error message about no unspace in regexes to explain how to quote space or #
  • pass single coeff to radcalc to make:16<.BABEFACE> easier to allow
  • gives better message on missing ** part of radix literals
  • worked around fact that:: doesn't correctly suppress relexing of multi tokens
  • scrapped the workaround and did a complete refactor of commit point transactions; no longer uses exceptions to commit
  • instead, it walks the current commit chain to the proper commit target to disable choosers that should not choose any more options
  • commit chain aliasing and forking to make a cactus stack is now managed by cursors, mostly transparently
  • weighed in on the subject of stability domains (or lack thereof) in Rakudo *

Patrick:

  • still working on personal issues, but hope to have some resolution by Saturday
  • haven't had much time to work on Rakudo, but show up on #perl6 to give advice sometimes
  • read Larry's email to the list; it was very helpful

Allison:

  • met some interesting people at SxSW doing open source education technology
  • reviewing the roadmap
  • the GC sounds like the most important thing to work on next
  • trying to catch up from having spotty network access lately

Jerry:

  • the other Rakudo developers have started weekly planning meetings
  • Jonathan has taken the lead
  • plenty of contributors are in the meeting and offered to take on new tasks
  • Rakudo Star may have a smaller scope, but it'll still come out in Q2
  • it's nice to see that the Rakudo community continues even as Patrick has an extended absence
  • still some Parrot issues affecting Rakudo
  • PaFo hopes to have its 501(c)3 application done by summer

c:

  • bugfixes
  • minor optimizations
  • helped merge the PCC refactor branch
  • working on Rakudo memory issues (long analysis follows, partly Parrot GC and partly NQP behavior)

Syndicated 2010-03-31 21:20:11 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 17 March 2010

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 17 March 2010. Larry, Allison, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • documented which ops don't autoclose with *, including assignment
  • conjectured a generalization of the closure-calling context (value-only lists) that subscripts enforce
  • this generalization might allow the autoclosing of some of the current exceptions such as 1..*
  • added Z to go with X metaop; documented that X and Z desugar to higher-order methods, crosswith and zipwith
  • speculate about how to zip/cross dwimmily with non-identical ops; possibly creating a real use case for surreal precedence
  • however, for now sticking with conservative approach of requiring parens on differing list infixes
  • hacking on viv again
  • trying to get that bootstrapped, so I don't have to use gimme5
  • unbitrotted viv --p6 so it exactly reproduces STD.pm again
  • various developments with viv --p5 toward replacing gimme5
  • should make it easier to emit other parsers eventually
  • may emit Rakudo code someday
  • it's a race to see whether STD can do that before the current Rakudo parser resyncs with STD
  • anyone who wants to bootstrap on some other VM might want to use that
  • mostly tired of writing in the subset of Perl 6 that gimme5 understands
  • mostly hacking on better error messages, as always
  • catches use of non-$ hard reference
  • STD now read minds of people who forget that ".meth I" is a two-terms-in-a-row error
  • now produces good messages on attempts to use y/// or tr/a-z/A-Z/ syntax
  • now reports "previous line missing its semicolon" in the unexpected block checker
  • ambiguous use of. probably indicates p5-think, not missing method parens
  • STD now has in a q-like sublanguage for tr/// string parsing
  • implements the MONKEY_TYPING constraint on augment and supersede declarators
  • various random cleanups and bugfixes
  • added Z metaoperator
  • lots of works on regex flags to unify them into a single %*RX structure at parse time
  • makes it easier to do all of the lexical scoping in parallel
  • can now remap run-time's $?FOO variables to parser's $*FOO dynamic variables
  • otherwise, bugfixes, spec cleanup, and test cleanup

Allison:

  • working on tickets
  • updating the Parrot roadmap to match our Rakudo Star support plan
  • working on the mini-language in NQP for a class assignment
  • found a new Pynie developer who saw my talk at Pycon
  • may be doing a Summer of Code project in it
  • answering lots of questions on IRC and helping out with ideas

c:

  • working on lots of little bugs for Parrot
  • should have the method namespace bug fixed, with help from Andrew
  • exploring some optimization possibilities
  • should be able to merge the PCC refactor shortly
  • Allison, see TT #1511

Allison:

  • we need to add a new opcode, something like set_want
  • call it to update the CallContext with expected return information

c:

  • works a bit like Perl 5 there
  • we could use that information for MMD, that'd be interesting

Syndicated 2010-03-31 21:17:44 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 10 March 2010

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 10 March 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • scrapped @array[%100_000] modular subscript notation in favor of a more general mapping closure
  • put back:s file test, removed:z,:T,:B,:M,:A,:C
  • clarified that these are defined on IO, not on strings
  • deprecated the {*} and #= reduction stub notations in grammars
  • attributive parameters now default to is copy binding; but easy for an attribute to override this with is ref
  • tried to move operator definitions to CORE; found one approach that doesn't work and abandoned it
  • STD now allows _ in numeric variable names like $10_000.
  • factored out curlycheck so we can use it on any trailing curly
  • postcircumfix:<{ }> now uses curlycheck for consistency
  • STD now speculates missing semicolon when two terms in a row are separated by at least one newline
  • removed mention of *.notdef in favor of:!defined
  • still need to remove it from the spec though
  • ambiguously rebound outer lexicals now detected even if ambiguity propagates from an inner scope
  • reports more pertinent information in that case so the difficulty can be understood by the user
  • various random debugger refactorings
  • properly scope dynamic package names for block-oriented packages to include name declaration
  • package_def of; packages now eats statementlist itself to stay inside proper scope
  • much work on package qualified names
  • correctly parse <$x> part of FOO::<$x> as part of variable name
  • correctly follow symbolically indirected OUTER:: links
  • find_top_pkg no longer cares if name ends in::
  • STD now figures out whether initial components lead to package or lexical scope
  • no longer scans outer scopes on qualified names
  • now handles FOO::<$x> form in check_variable
  • no longer checks for @/% mistakes on qualified names

Patrick:

  • haven't had much hacking time lately due to personal demands
  • should be able to hack again later today and the rest of the week

Allison:

  • worked on the PCC refactor
  • that went well; the hackathon was good
  • it didn't pull in a lot of people, but me dedicating the weekend to it was helpful
  • also pulled in a few other people willing to try things out
  • we made good progress
  • our initial task is over
  • we're in the nebulous stage of debugging
  • need to review a change in optional return values
  • also worked on Ubuntu and Debian packaging
  • Parrot 2.0 is in both
  • it'll be in April's Lucid Lynx Ubuntu

Jerry:

  • Google Summer of Code is starting
  • TPF and PaFo are teaming up this year
  • we're working on the organization application
  • Jonathan Leto is leading things and I'm backing him up
  • we're looking for mentors and ideas; see the TPF GSoC wiki page

Will:

  • started going through Rakudo's RT queue
  • did more Parrot building and cleanup work
  • no longer invoking Perl to invoke the C compiler for each build file
  • shaved some time off the build
  • eliminated one recursive make, leaving two
  • then I can remove more things from config

c:

  • worked on a bunch of branches
  • fixed a couple of bugs
  • hope to get more bug fixing time in

Syndicated 2010-03-23 01:37:49 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 03 March 2010

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 03 March 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • noted how lastcall allows nextsame control of nested dispatchers
  • reserved the final paren-based shape declaration syntax without committing to it meaning anything
  • clarified that Nil itself is defined but likes to produce undefined values when indexed
  • added some clarifications of how the series operator deals with type information
  • clarified that Pair.ACCEPTS uses "so" and "not" semantics so:s returns True or False
  • removed the 1/2 and +2-3i literal forms, now rely on angle forms <1/2> and <+2-3i> for literals, and the bare forms now rely on constant folding rather than a fragile special syntax
  • in STD, made undeclared variables more fatal
  • STD now tries to be helpful if the user makes the typical P5-ish variant-sigil mistake on arrays and hashes
  • also improved error message on the -{}> kind of mistake that P5 programmers will make
  • my $a, $b now gives better message
  • STD now reserves the () shape syntax per current spec
  • fixed regression on indirect method knowing that method name is not bound early
  • moved unexpected-!! panic from infixstoppers to infix:<!!> for better extensibility
  • so a user's infix definition isn't ignored if it starts with !!
  • you can define user operators starting with that, and it only complains for the right reasons now
  • STD now gives an accurate message when a prefix is missing its term
  • removed deprecated rational and complex literal forms from STD
  • much preliminary work for moving operator defs to CORE.setting, not yet checked in
  • only blocker is not being in Copenhagen

Patrick:

  • Jonathan, Carl, Moritz, and Martin will be there
  • I proposed a panel discussion instead of my talk on Tuesday afternoon at 3 pm
  • I'll be online then
  • can't make it due to sudden personal reasons
  • will be online quite a bit the next few days though
  • can participate in the hackathon remotely
  • worked mostly on helping other people get their tasks done
  • updated the parser to handle more operator conditions
  • working toward enabling user-defined operators
  • quite a few new people submitted patches
  • several were non-trivial
  • one patch put grammars, regexes, and tokens back in Rakudo
  • that's not trivial and it worked pretty well
  • I'm reviewing patches and making comments
  • lots of good progress
  • expect lots more during the hackathon

Allison:

  • going to work on code stuff this weekend instead of traveling
  • had a very productive trip
  • glad to be home to get work done
  • working on the PCC branch this week
  • should be, fingers crossed, small and easy to get done
  • want to avoid creature feeping
  • get the re-ordering through and move on

Jerry:

  • having trouble building Rakudo on Windows
  • have time to debug with people online
  • this is preventing me from talking to Patrick about and working on S19

Patrick:

  • we can work on that tomorrow

Will:

  • saw that problem on p6c as well
  • fixed a Parrot bug for Patrick related to STRING indices
  • we have some speed fixes on top of that
  • still working on the build cleanup
  • hope to merge to trunk in the next two or three days

c:

  • haven't had and won't have much time
  • fixed a few bugs
  • working on helping other people get stuff done

Jerry:

  • is there a hackathon or meeting time available after OSCON?

Allison:

  • recommend the weekend after

Patrick:

  • there'd have to be a hackathon for me to get TPF sponsorship

Jerry:

  • the pace of spec changes has picked up
  • any ideas what's driving that?
  • is it different from before?
  • was the end-of-year lull the same as before?

Larry:

  • everyone did take a break over Christmas
  • most of the changes are still simplifications
  • or responses to implementation issues
  • dealing with inconsistencies

Patrick:

  • a lot of implementation issues have come up over the past three weeks

Larry:

  • ng has flushed out a lot of design issues

Jerry:

  • that's great!

Patrick:

  • that's great for Larry, but I have a deadline!

Allison:

  • remember, it's a stake in the ground
  • "This is a release of Perl 6 you can use NOW!"

Patrick:

  • we're driving the spec with regard to lists and arrays

Larry:

  • they essentially have the same structure
  • they need separate typology
  • you need to know whether to clone an iterator
  • that's the only reason you have to know

Patrick:

  • did you see my comment about binding being the distinguishing feature?

Larry:

  • I think about that in inside out terms
  • not sure I can put that in words yet
  • had a conversation with Solomon about the FP view of iterators and arrays
  • that's some of my thinking
  • do we promise to hold a pointer fixed, or go on to the next thing?
  • whether that thing is persistent is mostly the bailiwick of the GC, from the standpoint of the language

Patrick:

  • I wasn't sure how that applied to my specific context
  • maybe I should work up a description of words or implementation
  • some lists I want to keep around reified elements
  • some lists I don't
  • the distinction is whether it's bound to any variable

Larry:

  • may depend on what it's bound to
  • we might make the keeparound promise only for binding to @

Patrick:

  • I came up with binding to $ examples
  • we can get laziness but eat up a ton of memory
  • if we throw things away when iterating, we get more things wrong

Larry:

  • it's a matter of tracking
  • are we bound to something that tells the GC to keep the rest of the list around?
  • that's the FP view

Patrick:

  • that's not just a GC view
  • it's how people refer to them
  • my GC is taken care of by my virtual machine anyway
  • it's about reachability from the HLL
  • or did you see it disappear

Larry:

  • that's whether you have a reference to it

Patrick:

  • how do you know whether to keep a reference to it?
  • I've produced this element
  • can I send it back to the caller
  • or do I need to keep it around so something else can get to it
  • if the iterator itself is bound, you keep the reference
  • if it's not bound, you can return it but not keep the reference around
  • I'll write up my thoughts

Jerry:

  • will these changes settle down after Rakudo *?
  • are they a precursor to that release?
  • will they continue afterward?
  • will Rakudo * go stale?
  • that's a tough one to answer

Patrick:

  • I can't guarantee stability at this point
  • we want a useful release
  • we'd like not to have any deprecations after that point
  • given how implementations and applications drive implementations
  • Rakudo * exists to encourage people to develop applications
  • we've never made that stability an explicit goal for Rakudo *
  • we'll probably institute deprecation cycles when it comes out
  • we don't want to change the world out from under people
  • it doesn't represent a spec freeze
  • thinking of a separate distribution release from the compiler release
  • a three month stability cycle of releases for Rakudo *
  • a different point of view
  • any distribution release doesn't have to be tied to the newest compiler release
  • I see Rakudo * as a series of releases, not a single release

Syndicated 2010-03-13 23:19:22 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 24 February 2010

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 24 February 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • my work last week was almost entirely responsive to various discussions on irc and p6l, even when it doesn't seem like it
  • clarified that LEAVE-style phasers do not trip till after an exception is handled (and not resumed)
  • the implementation of take is specifically before unwinding even if implemented with a control exception
  • simplified series operator by moving generator function to the left side (any function on right side will now be a limiting conditional)
  • a * is no longer required to intuit the series on the left; the absence of generator before the... operator is sufficient
  • first argument on the right of... is now always a limiter argument
  • for convenience and consistency, added a new...^ form to exclude a literal limiter from the generated series
  • unlike ranges, however, there is no leading exclusion ^... or ^...^
  • series is a list associative list infix, and each... pays attention only the portion of the list immediately to its left (plus the limit from the right)
  • an "impossible" limit can terminate a monotonic intuited series even if the limit can never match exactly
  • variables now default to a type of Any, and must explicitly declare Mu or Junction type to hold junctions
  • this is to reduce pressure to duplicate many functions like == with Mu arguments; most of our failure values should be derived from Any in any case
  • a Mu result is more indicative of a major malfunction now, and is caught at first assignment to an Any variable
  • Instant/Duration types are biased away from Num and towards Rat/FatRat semantics
  • Instant is now completely opaque; we no longer pretend to be the same as TAI, numerically speaking
  • Instants are now considered a more basic type than epochs, which are just particular named instants
  • all culturally aware time can be based on calculations involving instants and durations
  • list associative operators now treat non-matching op names as non-associative rather than right-associative, forcing parens
  • Whatever semantics now autocurry any prefix, postfix, or infix operator that doesn't explicitly declare that it handles whateverness itself
  • WhateverCode objects now take a signature to keep clear how many args are not yet curried
  • so *+* is now more like WhateverCode:($x,$y)
  • autocurrying is still transitive so multiple ops can curry themselves around a *
  • added semilists as Slicel type to go with Parcel
  • this allows us to bind @array[1,2,3] differently from @array[1,2,3;4,5,6], for instance
  • the Matcher type now excludes Bool arguments to prevent accidental binding to outer $_ when closure is needed
  • when and ~~ will now warn of always/never matching on direct use of True or False names as matcher
  • STD generalizes \w lookahead to all twigils now
  • STD now treats non-matching list associatives as non-associative
  • things like 1 min 2 max 3 are now illegal, and require parenthesization for clarity
  • STD now treat invocant colon as just a comma variant so it does not fall afoul of the list associativity change
  • CORE now recognizes the TrigBase enumeration

Patrick:

  • first release of the new branch of Rakudo last week
  • passing ~25,000 tests at the release
  • thanks to optimizations from chromatic, Jonathan, and Vasily, Rakudo has a lot of speed improvements
  • in particular, it can run those tests in under 10 minutes, non-parallel, depending on your hardware
  • older releases took 25 minutes and more
  • the regex tests will slow things down
  • ultimately, we're seeing a big speed improvement over the past releases
  • cleaned up lists and slices, now they work pretty well
  • worked with Solomon Foster and others to speed up trig operations
  • fixed a bug related to lexicals declared in classes
  • fixed the long-standing and often recurring problem with curlies ending a line/statement causing the next statement to be a statement modifier
  • easy to fix in the new grammar
  • that was nice
  • made an initial implementation of the sort method
  • it's very short, because Parrot provides one
  • there are a few bugs in Rakudo there still, but I'll get them
  • planning for the Copenhagen hackathon on March 5 - 9
  • Jonathan and I have been updating the Rakudo roadmap
  • will check that in in the next couple of hours
  • so far, every time we review it, we surprise ourselves at how much we've accomplished
  • we're meeting all of the top priority goals without making any heroic efforts
  • we'll put those goals in as well as timelines
  • most of the major tasks from previous roadmaps have happened

Allison:

  • working on Python this week
  • attended Python VM summit, Python language summit, and PyCon
  • Parrot's on good track to support what Python needs
  • useful to make community connections
  • when I reviewed Pynie, I was surprised to see how close it is to supporting the whole Python syntax
  • some of those features are big, like objects
  • but we should support them soon
  • Debian packages delayed by the absence of a sponsor
  • they should go into Debian soon though
  • I put in a request for feature-freeze exception for Ubuntu 10.4
  • Parrot 2.0 should go in
  • haven't made any commits to the PCC branch
  • that'll be a top priority for next week

c:

  • fixed a Parrot GC bug for last week's Rakudo release
  • made some optimizations in Rakudo and Parrot
  • helped Jonathan find a few more
  • fixed a long-standing math MMD bug
  • still working on HLL subclassing; more tricky than you think
  • may be some conflicting design goals about vtable overriding and MMD

Allison:

  • Patrick, do we need an explicit deprecation for old PGE and NQP?

Patrick:

  • I think Will already added one for NQP
  • we can add one for PGE if we need
  • they don't necessarily have to disappear at the next release
  • but no one's planning to maintain them

Allison:

  • no reason not to put in the notice now
  • we don't have to remove them at the earliest possible date

Syndicated 2010-03-02 05:12:09 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 17 February 2010

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 17 February 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • much work clarifying relationship of parcels to everything else (<a b>, assignment, arguments, captures, parameters, signatures, gather/take, and loop returns)
  • we now list all scope declarators in one spot
  • conjectured some ideas on how to handle the allomorphism of literals more dwimmily
  • had already specced some of this behavior for literals found inside qw angles.
  • literals that exceed a Rat64's denominator automatically keep the string form around for coercion to other types
  • clarified that anon declarator allows a name but simply doesn't install it in the symbol table
  • respecced the trig functions to use a pragma to imported fast curried functions
  • still uses enum second argument for the general case (rakudo is still stuck on slow strings there)
  • on iterators, renamed.getobj to.getarg since arguments are the typical positional/slicey usage
  • signatures are never bound against parcels anymore, only against captures
  • we now use "argument" as a technical term meaning either a real parcel or an object that can be used independent of context as an argument
  • anything that would stay discrete when bound to a positional, basically
  • return, take, and loop return objects are also arguments in that sense
  • they all return either a parcel or anything that can stand on its own as an argument
  • STD now adds a shortname alias on adverbialized names, ignores collisions on the shortname for now, which is okay for multis
  • STD now complains about longname (adverbialized) collisions
  • STD no longer carps about duplicate anonymous routine declarations
  • made the undeclared type message the same for parameters as for other declarations
  • clarify the error message about anonymous variables
  • no longer report a $) variable error where ) is the $*GOAL
  • add WHAT etc. to list of functions that require an argument

Allison:

  • working on two HLL implementations
  • one is Pynie, the other is Camle
  • nothing to do with Caml or ML
  • I've noticed huge improvements in NQP-rx from the previous NQP
  • can't say which feature improvements make the most difference, but I'll migrate Pynie pretty soon to take advantage of the new version
  • continuing to shepherd Debian and Ubuntu packages

Patrick:

  • essentially all I did was unify things
  • previously it had been two or three tools
  • it's just one

Allison:

  • even the syntax seems more regular

Patrick:

  • there are more pieces available in NQP-rx
  • Rakudo's -ng is now master
  • the old master is now -alpha
  • we took a big hit on spectests, but they seem to be coming back quickly
  • 5000 tests pass on trunk now
  • we have 16k or 17k we haven't re-enabled; they make the spectest slower
  • Jonathan thinks we may pass 25,000 tests now
  • that's great, considering where we were a week ago
  • I redid Rakudo's container, value, and assignment module
  • previously variables held values directly
  • now they contain reference PMCs
  • that cleaned up many things
  • we use more PMCs, but now we don't clone and copy as much
  • we move references around more
  • seems closer to how Perl 6 handles things
  • was much easier than I expected
  • updated the NQP-rx regex engine and built in constant types
  • handles Unicode character names
  • reclaims plenty of tests
  • answered lots of questions for people adding things into Rakudo
  • prioritizing other people writing code over writing code
  • increases our developer pool; seems to be working well
  • new release of Rakudo planned for tomorrow
  • don't know how many tests we'll pass, but it should go well
  • plan to put in a few things like sort and grammars over the next week
  • then I'll review the RT queue to find bugs and (hopefully) closeable bugs

c:

  • working on GC tuning
  • also working on String PMC tuning
  • working on built-in types and their behavior as classes and parent classes
  • the multidispatch bugs in particular I hope to solve

Syndicated 2010-02-25 00:27:32 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 10 February 2010

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 10 February 2010. Larry, Patrick, Will, Jerry, and chromatic attended.

Will:

  • working on simplifying Parrot's build process
  • trying to remove an invocation of Perl 5 for every compilation
  • it's old and a waste of many things
  • hope to have that removed by the end of the week

Jerry:

  • the new #ps time should help me to attend
  • looking forward to a Parrot/Rakudo workshop, possibly at YAPC::NA
  • already working on artwork
  • would like to get the command-line done for Rakudo *
  • lacking tuits
  • need some time with Patrick over the next few days
  • weekends should free up after next week

Larry:

  • refined the specified semantics of bitwise operators
  • changed ugly **() special form to prefix:<||> by analogy to prefix:<|>, and relationship of ** to *.
  • STD now accepts prefix || for slice interpolation
  • deleted old p5=> that masak++ noticed
  • added explicit copyright notices to STD files
  • spruced up error message on -> in postfix position (either pointy block or Perl 5 method dereference)
  • mostly just served as Chief Resident Oracle on IRC

Patrick:

  • had a nice vacation in Florida
  • didn't have as much hacking time, due to plane delays
  • should get back to coding later today
  • working on the Rakudo hackathon in Copenhagen on March 6 and 7
  • core hackers session on 8th and 9th there
  • looking forward to that

c:

  • fixed a couple of bugs
  • did a bit of optimization
  • wrote out a GC optimization plan
  • wrote plan for a sweep free GC
  • think we can get those both going in the next week

Jerry:

  • noticing a lot of new branches and removals and new things in Parrot recently
  • are these following the roadmap?
  • are people going off on their own?

Will:

  • the deprecation stuff is all documented and seems reasonable
  • Andrew's discussion today is new stuff, but a reasonable discussion to have
  • I'm working on cleanup stuff
  • having a roadmap and trying to force people to stick to it is always... impossible
  • people will work on what they find shiny or what blocks them
  • if it's not on the roadmap, it's okay if it's not hurting the project

Jerry:

  • we've changed our deprecation cycle
  • was that change enough to unstick people to do something?
  • was it beneficial to our users and our core developers?

Will:

  • definitely a positive

Jerry:

  • still not a lot of mailing list discussion
  • how is Parrot meeting Rakudo's goals for the Rakudo * release?

Patrick:

  • as it stands today, it's adequate for what we need
  • if it weren't, you'd be hearing about it
  • the next thing for us is performance
  • any performance improvements are welcome
  • the biggest thing there is GC, and that's an area of focus
  • no big pushes I need to make lately
  • have noticed Andrew's desire to remove some Parrot features
  • they're useful from an HLL perspective
  • I do worry about changes to core Parrot divorced from HLL concerns
  • I don't know who's going to be the traffic cop for those changes
  • I don't have time to do it

Will:

  • based on the discussion in channel today
  • making Parrot leaner, faster, smaller may not necessarily jive with keeping the features as they exist now
  • he's not trying to remove features
  • he's trying to get the same effect with a faster Parrot

Patrick:

  • I agree with those motives

Will:

  • even if we do rewrite things, they have to work more or less as they do right now

Patrick:

  • reviewing the roadmap from December....
  • GC work is happening
  • no one seems to work on subroutine leave semantics
  • Stephen Weeks is the best one to look at that
  • performance is our biggest need right now
  • but the -ng branch performs better for various reasons
  • has anyone built -ng against the latest Parrot?

Will:

  • I think Vasily has checked his branches against Rakudo
  • not sure if that was against -ng

Patrick:

  • master and -ng are pretty close together in terms of the Parrot core
  • we'll make -ng the master branch very soon
  • unless I get bogged down on iterators again

Syndicated 2010-02-19 03:31:59 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 03 February 2010

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 03 February 2010. Larry, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • more cleanup of iteration semantics
  • no longer signal end with Nil, but with special EMPTY failure
  • this can support either unthrown or thrown exception styles
  • added in batching iterator interface
  • proposed new E operator for efficient list end detection; gathering feedback
  • detangling of sigils from contexts; for example, @ no longer implies flattening
  • coercions all defined to take parcels so they don't flatten accidentally
  • more cleanup of various types (captures,lists) that should be considered parcels
  • forcibly amputated the @@ sigil; have fixed up most of the bloody stumps
  • instead of *@@ parameters, we now have a ** slice marker on parameters
  • removed references to [;] reduction since it wouldn't work (because of return parcel embedding)
  • new **() interpolator instead
  • clarified that function calls in a list are called eagerly, but their results are potentially lazy
  • (also mentioned ways to make the call lazy too)
  • renamed iterator methods for more clarity, removing contradictory usages of "item"
  • iterators now iterated with get, getobj, batch, and batchobj
  • specced that a missing maximum allows the iterator to decide batch size.
  • get and getobj must be atomic under multi-threading so message queues work (but maybe that's backwards, and push should be atomic)
  • slice now defined to turn subparcels into Seq objects
  • spec that most of the work of flat and slice are done by binding to *@ or **@
  • new flat operator detangles flattening semantics from normal unmarked list semantics
  • for all specced functions, *@@ parameters changed to **@
  • multiple dimensions now defined in terms of nested parcels, not feeds, to avoid implying multithreading on every subscript
  • either range or series iterator now autotruncates in a subscript
  • no autotruncation on left end of a subscript anymore
  • did some cleanup of feeds; more is needed to have clearer target semantics
  • feeds no longer take a whatever target with implicit semantics; just use an explicit target
  • not much hacking, but edited tests to change @@ to something else appropriate
  • tracked name changes in CORE
  • wrote a long screed on why Perl 6 has one-pass parsing and why typenames must be pre-declared

Patrick:

  • working on interators and lists in the -ng branch
  • brought up a few issues with Larry as appropriate
  • took issue with others, as appropriate
  • happy with our progress there
  • expect to make this branch the new master in the next day or so
  • will be some regressions, but it's time to do it
  • there's no development taking place on other branches, so let's commit and do it
  • people will be comfortable about doing their own work and not having it lost on some other branch

c:

  • looking into GC tuning and ideas
  • still working on getting methods out of namespaces
  • need four uninterrupted hours

Syndicated 2010-02-18 04:58:35 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 27 January 2010

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 27 January 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

  • tweaked definition of when a series operator is considered infinite
  • nailed down more list assignment semantics with respect to interators
  • clarified how ($a, $b, @a) = 1..* works
  • KeyWeight deletion criterion kept consistent with other KeyHash types
  • negative keyweights are allowed to fail at pick time
  • "mostly eager" now assumes unknown closure generators are probably infinite
  • random whackage on List, Seq, Parcel, Capture, Iterator, Nil etc.
  • List is now simply the iterator role, and doesn't do Positional
  • Seq takes over Positional duties for reified (or reifiable) value lists
  • think of Seq now as a constant Array (but also lazy like Array)
  • Iterable now means you can ask for an iterator, but doesn't do List
  • Array, Seq, etc do Iterable, but not List
  • only actual iterators do List
  • Nil is defined as a suitable sentinel for both list and slice iterators
  • continued to rethink that with pmichaud++ et al
  • we'll probably end up with an EMPTY special exception object to be the iterator sentinal
  • proposed an E operator to go with it to make testing for EMPTY across multiple iterators very fast
  • other than that, mostly just bug whacking, no major refactors
  • still thinking about doing real LTM for STD
  • did lazify Cursor's fnum->fate translations for shorter LTM candidates in preparation for smarter LTM
  • we don't need special objects for the items that get matches
  • we do need to think more about the hyper cases
  • how to do list processing using balanced trees of delegated sub refs
  • don't want to build in serial assumptions where we don't need them

Patrick:

  • made the Rakudo #25 release last week
  • it was much easier to make the release than explain what we were planning to do instead
  • also working on iterators and lists
  • NG branch is blocking on that
  • worked on the design in my head for three weeks
  • realized that we were doing iterators completely wrong the other night
  • Larry's making some useful changes to the spec in response
  • there are still some unclear spots in the spec
  • we need an implementation to figure those out
  • my biggest question is the relationship between List, Parcel, Itertor, and array
  • as of this morning, I think I have it
  • that code seems to be working and efficient
  • so far it's working well
  • continuing with that
  • wrote a very short range iterator prototype that colomon has used
  • also write a map iterator that works
  • coming up with examples for the zip operator was nice
  • good ideas for what we need to be able to do
  • objects that can iterate have a.iterator() method
  • to interpolate that into a list,.list() returns a flat Parcel for that iterator
  • Parcels know how to generate Iterators
  • those know how to handle Iterators of Iterators
  • I suspect that's how we do hyper iteration
  • change Parcels to understand that
  • adding pieces back into the ng branch
  • next I have to fix slurpy parameters
  • many of our builtins need that
  • need to figure out Jonathan's code to do that
  • after that, I'll do arrays
  • that should remove the blockers on the ng branch

Allison:

  • working on Pynie
  • Francois has helped greatly to update it for Plumage

c:

  • still working on the TT #389 fix
  • think I have the right design, just need time to implement it
  • working on a potential new time for #parrotsketch

Allison:

  • thinking about hackathons
  • would be nice to have a Rakudo hackathon at YAPC::NA

c:

  • Parrot will come up; didn't it come up about half the time last year?

Patrick:

  • it was all Parrot

Allison:

  • you'll have an influx of Rakudo interest two months after Rakudo Star

Patrick:

  • probably will have one before then
  • but can tell people "Go to YAPC; we'll show you how to help in person there"

Syndicated 2010-01-29 21:00:38 from pudge

Perl 6 Design Minutes for 20 January 2010

The Perl 6 design team meet by phone on 20 January 2010. Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Allison:

  • did distro testing on Ubuntu and the Mac
  • set up a Hardy chroot; Parrot works just fine there
  • have a feeling we missed some deprecations, but we have a lot in there
  • enough to work on for three months

c:

  • I added the STRING idea, to give us the possibility of the value semantics change

Allison:

  • less stressful to have three months at a time
  • otherwise working on class assignments

Patrick:

  • family illness knocked me out for a few days
  • we'll postspone the January release for up to a week
  • going to make the Rakudo-ng branch the master branch
  • that won't take more than a week
  • we'll release by Thursday of next week
  • also need to make the -ng branch build with Parrot 2.0.0
  • need to merge some outstanding patches to make that work

c:

  • are you going to stick with 2.0.0?

Patrick:

  • unless we need a change in Parrot that we can't live without, yes

Will:

  • we could do a point release if you need one

Patrick:

  • that's up to Parrot
  • from Rakudo's perspective, that's not terribly important
  • we're shifting everything around for the -ng branch
  • we'll definitely stick the February release to Parrot 2.1
  • I'll post messages to the list about the new release plan shortly

Will:

  • working on the one_make branch in Parrot
  • trying to mark dependencies properly in a single Makefile
  • get some of that out of the configure system
  • we should be able to merge to trunk in a day or two
  • there's still more work to do, but we're at a merge point soon

c:

  • released Parrot 2.0.0 yesterday
  • sending out release announcements soon, but the code is out
  • Stephen Weeks helped me fix up PGE not to fetch methods from namespaces
  • should be able to merge the TT #389 fix branch to trunk very soon
  • will take a look at other Rakudo blockers after that

Syndicated 2010-01-28 00:10:27 from pudge

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