Pugs

YAPC-SA-2007 Hackathon

Here is the report on the 4 days of the YAPC-SA-2007 Hackathon, from April 12 to 15, 2007, in Porto Alegre, Brazil (during fisl8.0).

v6/docs
- added the KindaPerl6 diagram
- added a KindaPerl6 memory layout diagram - with help from #perl6
- added the MiniPerl6 talk (pdf)

MiniPerl6
- started the Perl6-in-Parrot target: desugars MiniPerl6 into p6parrot supported features
- grammar fix: semicolon is optional after a block
- perl5 backend: implemented warn()
- new: mp6-to-AST script
- nferraz started porting Test.pm to mp6

KindaPerl6
- memory management: BEGIN-block side effects are logged
- updated plan, discussed a possible release schedule
- fixed the container proxy algorithm (the implementation needs to be fixed; pugs has the same problem)

v6.pm
- fixed the "fish-operator" =<>
- fixed the quoted-word-operator <...>

Pugs::Compiler::Rule
- ratchet emitter fix, array interpolation now works

misc/pX
- nferraz and fglock started an adventure game implementation (with v6.pm), to be presented by nferraz at the Nordic Perl Workshop.

The network proxy at the conference did not allow commits to pass through, and there will be some delay until all the changes get to the repository.

Thanks to cmarcelo, david_fetter, eden_c, lorn, merlyn, and nferraz for 4 great days!

- Flavio S. Glock (fglock)

Pugs 6.2.13 released!

After nearly four months of development and 3400+ commits, I'm very glad to announce that Pugs 6.2.13 is now available:

http://pugs.blogs.com/dist/Perl6-Pugs-6.2.13.tar.gz
SIZE: 6839270
SHA1: b06b8434c64e9bb5e3ab482282fbae0a6ba69218

Motivated by increasing use of Pugs in production, this is an extra release in the 6.2.x series, offering another 200%+ improvement in performance, comprehensive support for interoperability with Perl 5 modules, a built-in grammar engine via native perl5 embedding, and much better support for roles, classes and objects.

The web-based presence of Pugs and Perl 6 has improved as well:

• http://run.pugscode.org/ puts the Pugs shell in your browser.
• http://spec.pugscode.org/ annotates  the Synopses with "smart-linked" tests.
• http://smoke.pugscode.org/ annotates that further with fail/pass/todo records.
• http://rakudo.org/perl6/ is a Wiki dedicated to collect Perl 6 related information.
• http://www.programmersheaven.com/2/Perl6-FAQ offers a comprehensive FAQ on Perl 6.

Thanks again to all lambdacamels on #perl6 for building this new ship together; it is truly an exhilarating voyage. :-)

Have -Ofun!
Audrey

RHOX slides available!

I've just finished delivering the talk; it went very well, though quite exhausting -- I feel as if I've just delivered 9 lightning talks in a row.

Slides are available in the usual formats: PDF, Flash, HTML+Images.  If you haven't read Jesse's Jifty talk, please read that first (it's .xul -- needs a Mozilla-based browser).

By going with the lighting talks style, at each section the audience seems to be evenly split between actively excited and totally lost. I wonder if I'll do better if I cover just half the material...

Oh, and I just discovered I have another lightning talk (ppencode) to give.  Well, at least this one is just five minutes, and I already go the slides ready. :-)

Boston.pm talk.

This afternoon I gave a revised Deploying Perl 6 talk to Boston.pm; thanks to putter++ for inviting me there! It was very nice to report the new progress that happened during the two hackathons since YAPC::NA, and people seems to like the v6-alpha roadmap very well. The slides are available as PDF and Flash as usual.

Was going to recap gaal++'s work the new AST and metaobject protocol today, but got myself sidetracked from #parrotsketch into a very long discussion on the possibility to deprecate an obscure feature (:immediate) from PIR.

Thanks to chip++ and allison++, a speedy consensus was reached within a day: We'll code up a saner alternative for the only thing people are currently (ab)using it for, but keep the :immediate syntax alive because there may be some unexpected use for it in the future.

It's wonderful to see #parrot and its RT queue becoming very active and helpful these days, due to Andy's successful call for janitors. Yay!

On the summaries front, kudra++ redid the Parrot section to fix the off-by-three-years error, and nothingmuch++ produced some scripts to make URI shortening and text formating easier, while preserving full links to Google Groups, as suggested by feedback comments on use.perl. It'll be a more smooth process next week... :-)

My YAPC::NA lightning talks.

I'm currently in the speaker's post-conference dinner, having delivered the ppencode talk again (PDF, Flash), as well as 1/5 of the "I think, but I cannot prove" talk, where five amateur futurists get to talk about what's going to happen next. Mine was:

I think, but I cannot prove, that next year JavaScript 2.0 will bootstrap itself, complete self hosting, compile back to JavaScript 1, and replace Ruby as the Next Big Thing on all environments.

I think CPAN and JSAN will merge; JavaScript will become the common backend for all dynamic languages, and so you can write Perl to run in the browser, on the server, and inside databases, all with the same set of development tools.

Because, as we know, "worse is better", so the worst scripting language is doomed to become the best.

Amusingly, Chip subsequently referred to this as the dystopian version of his "ubiquitous embedded Parrot" vision. :-)

YAPC::NA Talk...

...went quite successful (slides: PDF, Flash, HTML+images). It's essentially Ingy's talk, Stevan's talk, gaal's talk and my earlier Pugs talk rolled into one, so I had to talk very fast due to the sheer number of slides, and regrettably rushed through the question/answers a bit.

However, people on #yapc seems to like it. This comment from gnat++ on the slide about yesterday's hack really cracked me up:

23:04 <@gnat> I have no joke here, I just like to say "first you simply swap out the entire symbol table."

Now I'd need to sleep a bit (sadly skipping the conference banquet), and finish up the S06/S12 changes I talked about with TimToady++ and dconway++ today, and maybe draw some more diagrams about how the various subprojects work together, to prepare for the post-conference Hackathon. See you!

Pugs 6.2.12 released!

At the first day of YAPC::NA, Pugs team is happy to announce the joint release of Pugs 6.2.12, as well as the first CPAN release of v6.pm, our experimental Perl6-to-Perl5 compiler written in pure Perl, along with new versions of its components: Pugs::Compiler::Rule and Module::Compile.

The change log is available as part of the release; I'll post a HTMLified version of the change log (as well as write proper mailing list announcements) tomorrow after my talk on Deploying Perl 6.

Thanks to all your help for getting us here! :-)

Jifty talk at Portland.pm.

I gave Jesse's Jifty talk at Portland.pm meeting last night; people seems to like it, despite me being a bit unfamiliar with the slides myself. There is a recording courtesy of Chris Dawson. Enjoy! :-)

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...