|
|
Given that most of July and August for me was spent attending conferences, travel, vacation, and periods of limited network connectivity, it's been a while since I've been able to update Rakudo progress. So, this is a very brief update, to be followed by a longer post in a day or so. First, we continue to make progress on passing more spectests. As of this writing Rakudo is passing 2278 spectests. A graph of our progress is available from http://www.pmichaud.com/perl6/rakudo-tests-2008-08-25.png. Much of the credit for passing tests over the past few weeks goes to Jonathan Worthington, Moritz Lenz, and Carl Mäsak (again, apologies if I've overlooked anyone). It's really good to see progress coming from so many sources. OSCON and YAPC::EU were both excellent conferences, my compliments to the organizers of each of those. In particular, Jonathan, Allison, and I were able to use our time together at YAPC::EU to discuss and map out many of the outstanding issues for Parrot and Rakudo, which we can now begin documenting and implementing over the next few weeks and months. These include things like code initialization, handling Perl 6 parameter passing and signatures, MMD, strings, and many other issues. One of the outcomes of this was that early last week I finally got the code in place to enable pre-compiled Perl 6 modules to function properly. At the moment this has a quite dramatic effect on running the spectest regression suite, because we aren't having to parse and recompile Test.pm on each test file execution (and parsing is still our biggest bottleneck). So, running the regression suite dropped from twelve minutes to under four minutes on my system, which isn't quite so interminable. Of course, the next step will be to enable Rakudo to compiler Perl 6 programs into standalone PIR or PBC files that can automatically load the Perl 6 runtime. I expect to accomplish this sometime this week -- at present we need some refactors to the signature generation code that is blocking this from happening. We're also working on enabling parts of the standard runtime library ("Prelude") to be written in Perl 6 and precompiled by Rakudo, instead of having it all written in PIR. As part of this we may implement a Perl 6-with-inline-PIR capability to help with the builtins, to make it easier to attach MMD signatures to the builtin functions and make sure they're exported properly. We also have more of the interface for loading external modules (written in PIR or otherwise) specified, and will be working on that over the next couple of weeks. At the YAPC::EU hackathon, Jesse Vincent and I also spent some time updating the Rakudo ROADMAP document. This newer version of the ROADMAP identifies some of the specific components that are left to be developed, along with estimates of their complexity and dependencies. If you look at the document you'll see some notations about how long it will take to develop each feature; these estimates are all in "idealized programmer units". An "idealized programmer unit" here assumes that the people involved have no interruptions or distractions, has all of the needed prerequisites in place, is mentally charged and ready for programming, doesn't have to wait to coordinate questions or answers with others, etc. As such, the times given should be taken only as relative estimates of task difficulty, and not how long a particular task will take in real-world time units. The major subsystem redesign coming up for Rakudo will be changes to the parser and grammar engine to support protoregexes and longest token matching. This will enable us to support even more of the STD.pm "standard grammar". I expect much of this work to take place over the next four calendar months, as many elements are likely to require some intensive and sustained design and development effort (while trying to maintain progress in other areas). More on this as it progresses. Pm |
