Perl 6 Design minutes for 22 October 2008

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 22 October 2008. Larry, Patrick, Allison, Will, Jerry, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.

Patrick:

• mostly answering questions about Rakudo design
• continuing to work on namespace handling there and in PCT
• continued to work in my head on the lexicals implementation
• have a little code there too

Larry:

• looking into shoulder surgery in the next couple of weeks
• decided that I didn't like the infix:where operator, so I changed it to also to better indicate the leftness to rightness of it
• working on cutting down the size of the lexer cache in the world of STD and gimme
• they used to take up 3 GB and now they're down to 450 MB
• that's by not caching anonymous grammars which they throw away at the end of the current process anyway
• there's still a long way to go on that
• if you do a bzipped tar of the lex directory, it ends up with a 200:1 compression
• still lots of room for removing redundency
• while I'm looking at lexer caching, I'm trying to figure out the best strategy for getting rid of TRE
• half of the code just works around its bugs
• it'd be simpler and probably faster with something more straightforward
• otherwise little bugs and answering questions

Patrick:

• you also added usage information to viv
• thank you

Larry:

• I abandoned my goal last week of getting it to spit out Perl 6
• sidetracked into hacking on the lexer
• other people started to use it
• but the way they're trying to use it, it runs slowly
• I'm looking at ways of speeding that up

c:

• fixed a lot of bugs last week
• in particular, some of the MMD fallout
• blockers for mod_parrot
• we may be able to get under 600 open bugs by the end of the month
• hopefully under 500 by the end of the year
• otherwise looking forward to lots of Parrot cleanups

Nicholas:

• getting close to a RC for Perl 5.8.9

Allison:

• just flew to SF yesterday and back today

c:

• and boy are her arms tired

Allison:

• spent a lot of time on release bugfixing
• answering questions
• closing tickets
• made the significant TGE change we talked about last week
• updating the calling conventions branch
• then creating the IO branch
• those are my tasks for today

Jesse:

• talked to Richard a little bit about grants

Jerry:

• just released 0.8.0 yesterday
• we fixed a lot of bugs on the way to the release
• but we released it with more than I would have liked
• can't say why that is
• two big branch merges though, the MMD and HLL magic branches
• but we need to address our automated test environment and smokers
• we'll concentrate on that at the Developer's Summit in November
• sent out a survey to the mailing list
• starting to get responses
• going to the GSoC mentor summit on Friday night, come back Sunday evening
• at Mountain View