Pugs

Chicago Hackathon Day 1.

Today's multitasking-collaboration was highly, extremely, productive, on many fronts:

• I finally sat down with gaal++ to do the long-awaited P6AST redesign.
• uri++ proofread much of S02 and found a huge number of typographical/forward-reference-pedagogical errors.
• TimToady++ and I finally worked out the multi dispatch and implicit coercion semantics (not yet committed to S06).
• clkao++ implemented the Capture/Signature semantics for methods on Data::Bind (soon to be on CPAN -- after SVK 1.08's release I'm told).
• cwest++ started coding trypugs, a tryruby clone harnessing Pugs's interactive shell -- coded in Jifty, no less! (We'll probably deploy it on feather.perl6.nl soon.)
• With pmichaud++'s help, sanug++ (George Wood) made some amazing Perl 6 architecture diagrams, re-expressing the Pugs compilation flow under Parrot/PGE and Perl5/v6.pm's context. I've made some draft PDFs available by exporting the OmniGraffle Pro source file.
• kolibrie++ worked on (ab)using the <ws> rule to allow whitespace inrules to match arbitrary junks (an idea reminiscent of Template::Extract). With pmichaud++'s help, his proof of concept now worked flawlessly with PGE.
• stevan++ worked on Moose to push more non-sugary protocols into Class::MOP, and re-implement the two missing Perl 6 metaobjects (Package for adding, removing and testing existence of symbols, and Module for version and author metadata, as well as importing/exporting of symbols.)
• Ingy++ clarified the YAML situation on Perl tags, ruling that !!perl is correct, but both YAML::Syck and YAML.pm should recognize the !perl form.

There were far more happening than this -- everybody was hacking and discussing and triaging acively in the Common room -- but I'd need to sleep now, and resume the continuation tomorrow. See you!

The night before the Hackathon.

So the conference is over, the hackthon is about to start tomorrow -- meet us at 10am at the student center (by the coffee bar and 7-11) and we'll enter the dorms as a group -- with 30+ people signed up.

Contrary to the previous hackathons, my plan for this Hackathon is actually nothing -- the object/capture runcore Pugs changes for 6.28.0 will be done in Boston with a smaller number of lambdamoose; in Chicago here, I'll just be around and provide review/feedback/tutorial/etc and maybe suggest interesting/crazy ideas for people to try out.

During the dinner party, gaal++ released Best.pm, the cheap-and-cheerful module alternate loader (to choose one between YAML::Syck and YAML based on which one is available, for example), and I've finally got around to check in the great semicolon change that I've been bugging TimToady++ and dconway++ during all this conference.

Also, I outlined the changes Class::MOP and Moose needs to become the canonical Perl 6 metaobject protocol -- so fglock++ can get a free ride as v6.pm can now target Moose by compiling Perl 6 class declarations to Moose declarations.

In other news nothingmuch++ implemented serialization for code references in YAML::Syck for Perl 5, then went ahead to implement Ingy's new compatible-to-other-languages tagging scheme for Perl nodes. However, as this breaks compatibility with YAML.pm loader -- and I'm still trying to figure out if it's !!perl/hash or !perl/hash -- and also because nothingmuch is drunk now and in no shape of interractive coding sessions -- I'll probably hold until tomorrow when all involved parties are sober enough to talk through the implications. :-)

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!

Multiversioning and qualified packages

Following is an implementation of "qualified packages", which means that each module (Test1 and Test2) can depend on different variant ("Foo1" and "Foo2") of certain package ("Foo").

It's posted here because I couldn't remember just how many people I agreed to send it to. :-) In any case... enjoy, and see you tomorrow!

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! :-)

Preflight #2!

This is going to be the last preflight before the actual release tomorrow. Please test preflight #2, which should fix all the Win32 and GHC/Cabal building issues (SIZE: 2691084, SHA1: d996445c7c35b3a52e668a3c42dd7c1880ce2a31). Thanks! :-)

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! :-)

Preflight #1!

After two weeks of work to resolve various regressions in -pre0, 6.2.12-pre1 (SIZE=2841122 SHA1=f42d7130dbc3a9f44c1f02a7c8cb751b021303b1) is now available.

Again, please download, build and test it, and report problems at #perl6 or as comments here, so we can get a solid release going by YAPC::NA. Thanks! :-)

use v6-pugs;

now invokes the new Perl5-based Perl6 compiler:

use v6-pugs;
"hello, world".say;

$ perl -Ilib hello_world.pl

It can even be called from the command line:

$ perl -Ilib lib/v6.pm -e ' "hello, world".say; '

It still fails many of the sanity tests, as well as nearly all of the other tests under t/.