Maintaining the Perl 5 Core: December 2016 report

Dave Mitchell writes:

I spent December:

1) looking for quick some wins on speeding up perl compile-time, using
'perl -MCPAN -e1' as a typical example of loading and compiling several
.pm files.  I tweaked Perl_yyparse() and shaved ~2% off the compile time;
then tweaked Perl_sv_gets() and shaved another ~2% off, and also got a
pleasing run-time boost for line reading, with reading a big list of words
now ~8% faster on my system:

    perl -e'$i++ while (<>)' /usr/share/dict/words

2) investigating possible ways of making the regex engine faster by (in
some cases) processing 8 bytes at a time on 64-bit platforms. This
culminated in an this email thread:

    http://nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/241891

3) as usual, working on a few miscellaneous tickets.

SUMMARY:
      1:30 RT #130385 Bleadperl breaks DNS-LDNS
      1:00 RT #130385 Bleadperl breaks List-Pairwise
      1:00 RT #130398 Bleadperl breaks Method-Signatures
      4:26 [perl #129199] Difficult-to-trigger panic
      1:01 [perl #130247] Perl_rpeep(OP *): Assertion `oldop' failed
      0:55 [perl #130307] Bug: Regex matches when it shouldn't
      0:33 [perl #130311] heap-buffer-overflow Perl_yyparse
      0:55 fix build warnings and smoke failures
      1:40 fix some CPAN modules under PERL_OP_PARENT
     19:00 investigate making find_by_class faster()
      2:37 optimise Perl_sv_gets()
      4:45 optimise Perl_yyparse()
     12:20 process p5p mailbox
      3:22 review RT tickets
      3:04 review security tickets
    ------
     58:08 TOTAL (HH::MM)

 170.1 weeks
2338.8 total hours
  13.7 average hours per week

There are 61 hours left on the grant

Category: Grants , Perl 5 Development

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