Pugs

STM: retry and retry_with works!

The retry and retry_with (the latter is known as orElse in Haskell) support has just landed; here is an example scripts that shows how to call them.

Much thanks to Liz for coming up with the name and usage example as part of the Concurrency Spec draft. Oh, and once Charles's SoC project works, we'd be able to port that to Parrot, too. Yay! :-)

Microsoft ECS talk.

Was quite well-received; went 15 minutes overtime, but people seems to not mind at all. The PDF slides and Flash slides are available.

Going to sleep for a bit, then resuming 6.2.12 release engineering, then go hack at .Net MSIL<->Pugs PIL tomorrow with Erik Meijer and Brian Beckman from the VB team. That should be fun. :-)

NPW'06 lightning talk.

I registered an impromptu lightning talk slot at the last moment, and delivered an English port of Takesako's highly entertaining ppencode talk. (I ported it from the original Japanese to Chinese for OSDC.tw this April, as noted in Takesako's blog.)

Although some of the humor were inevitably lost in translation, it seems to be well received -- people were certainly laughing a lot! The PDF slides and Flash slides are available, too.

TimToady++ returned from his grandpathon, and we're reviewing the design on the show-stopping assign.t and its fallout. Now the conference is over, I do intend to get the changelog and release done tomorrow, to synchronize with Parrot 0.4.5. Stay tuned...

NPW'06 talk.

It went really well. PDF slides are available; my crazy .xul->.opml->.key compiler worked flawlessly against all odds, and the slides I put together 90 seconds before the talk worked fine, except for a few typos subsequently discovered by #perl6. More later...

Preflight #0!

After a long day of Pugs work, 6.2.12-pre0 (SIZE=3550098 SHA1=402a344b0187e69d2e597992e6d910c316675dbe) is finally there.

Please download, build and test it, and report problems at #perl6 or as comments here. Thanks! :-)

Completing assignments.

This morning Pugs was passing all its tests, except for one -- t/operators/assign.t, freshly checked in by TimToady++, tests for the new S03 ruling that makes the right-hand side of "=" parses differently, depending on whether the left hand side is a simple scalar or not.

One simple fix leads to another, and at the end of the day, Pugs is a quite different beast compared to 12 hours ago.

Some storytelling from the changelog follows, if you are interested...

Possible $job talk at OSCON.

So I've submitted a 45-minute talk proposal to OSCON'06 after all:

Programming the Kernel for Web 2.0

For a highly interactive web application to work well, the framework needs to manage user states, logic processes, and server resources intelligently.

This talk uses the Jifty kernel to demonstrate some interesting new concepts in this ever-expanding design space, including API reflection, client-side continuations, context switching, and mobile code.

We will also take approaches of several other web frameworks (Links, WaSH, Seaside, Rails, Catalyst, Springs, Cocoon, etc.), and express them as kernel modules on the Jifty system.

If accepted, that's going to be the most buzzword-compliant talk I've ever given. It will be a lot of fun preparing for the talk, though...

Parrot and Perl5 Embedding Repaired.

Now with extra import sugar for Perl 5:

use perl5:Digest::MD5 <md5_hex>;

# 09189568a8ee4d0addf53d2f6e4847cd
'pugs'.md5_hex.say;

Also, through some evil contortions, embedded Parrot now won't crash due to invalid PGE expressions. Hopefully some day Parrot can be embedded with multiple non-interfering instances, or maybe raise a proper exception instead of forcibly calling Parrot_exit on a PIR syntax error... But for now, evil contortions would have to do.

Next in sight: PGE adverb support, repair the JavaScript backend, README, and preflight!

Software Transactional Memory comes to Pugs.

As of r10528, the internal STM engine in the Haskell runtime is finally exposed to the userland:

my ($x, $y);
async {
    atomically {
        $x = $y + 1;
        $y = $x + 1;
    }   
} for 1..5;
say "($x, $y)" # Guaranteed to be (9, 10) 

I'd like to thank nothingmuch++ for demanding -- and sponsoring -- this wonderful language feature. See the slides and this paper and another paper for more about STM. More exciting combinators such as orElse, retry and assert coming soon!

All tests pass!

After another day of hacking and triaging, all 11428 tests now pass with no regressions. For 6.2.12, there are a few more things to do:

• Fix Parrot embedding and Perl5 embedding on MacIntel and make sure they pass their respective tests.
• Allow importing from Perl5 modules, such as use perl5:CGI <header>.
• Update the PGE bridge to Parrot 0.4.4 for complete regex/token/rule support.
• Integrate updates from TPF on README and copyright notice wordings.

...and of course, filling in the ChangeLog. gaal++ recapped to 9800; helps welcome!