The Perl Foundation

My job as Parrot Grant Manager is basically to make prepare a report every two months for NLnet, who are the funders behind the big Parrot grant.

Here is the grant report for June and July of 2006:

Pat Eyler pointed me to his interview with Kevin Tew of the Cardinal project. Cardinal is Ruby running on the Parrot virtual machine.

Here's the latest Parrot Grant Update ...

In August and September, Allison has been working on the PDD for IO, which she expects to finish sometime in October or November. Because IO, events, and threads are so inter-related, some of the IO work will spill over into work on the PDDs for events and threads as well.

From Friday November 10th to Sunday November 12th, over thirty Perl hackers converged on the Country Inn & Suites in Crystal Lake, IL, a far northwest suburb of Chicago. For three days, nearly around the clock, we worked, talked, ate, and worked some more on Perl projects of all kinds. There were hackers from around the Chicago area as well as others from Oregon, California, New York, Ontario and England. Some were only around for one day, while others came in Thursday night and left Monday morning. It was a gathering that let everyone do what they wanted, when they wanted, while still getting work done.

The Parrot project had the largest population working on it. Chip Salzenberg and Jerry Gay flew in to drive the development. Friday morning, there were six hackers who were familiar with Parrot, but when it was over, eight new project members had worked on it. Bugs were fixed, design documents were created, and hackers met other hackers for the first time.

Perl::Critic also had a big showing. Chris Dolan and yours truly met with Michael Wolf and James Keenan to create new policies and hash out design decisions as we pushed to the version 1.0 release of this crucial tool.

On Saturday night, Ken Krugler of the code search engine krugle.com gave a demo of the site, and heard feedback about how krugle.com can help serve the Perl community better. I'm excited about outside companies working to help Perl while helping themselves. Most important, Krugler sponsored the night's Chicago deep dish pizza to feed the hungry hacking throng.

Smaller projects got attention as well. Pete Krawczyk and I worked on projects like ack, File::Next and HTML::Tree, since most of our time was spent running around getting people to public transportation, getting snacks, ordering Chinese food, and making sure everything ran smoothly. For more details on who was there, and what we worked on, see the Hackathon Chicago wiki at http://rakudo.org/hackathon-chicago/.

The one question everyone asked was, "When's the next one?" The Perl Foundation is currently working on ideas, plans, budgets and sponsorship for making more hackathons happens, but we need people to host and organize them. A hackathon is an ideal way for a Perl Mongers group to host an event, but with much easier requirements than hosting YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference). If you or your Perl Mongers group would be interested in hosting a hackathon, please email me at andy@perl.org.

Parrot’s first ever Bug Day is this Saturday, 16 December 2006. The core Parrot developers will be in #parrot on irc.perl.org all day to:

• Review tickets in the Parrot RT queue
• Answer questions from newcomers
• Fix bugs
• Add features
• Improve the documentation or tests or…
• Recruit and encourage new developers

If you’re curious about Parrot, please join us. You don’t have to be an expert programmer. If you can follow the build instructions (or report where they fail for you), manage a source code checkout, and work an IRC client, you’re plenty qualified. There are plenty of ways to get involved in almost any capacity you can conceive.

Here's the latest grant update as sent to NLNet ...

During October and November, Allison has continued working on the PDD for IO, which she hopes to finish soon.

Parrot 0.4.7 was released on November 14th. This release includes design work on bytecode files, embedding, concurrency, and objects. The bytecode file PDD (PDD25) is complete, and is beginning to be implemented.

Here's the latest grant update as sent to NLNet ...

The 0.4.8 release Parrot marked the completion of a design milestone, the IO PDD. This is a major accomplishment, as the design work on IO impacts much of Parrot's design, including areas such as concurrency and networking. This work was completed by Allison with help and review by Jerry Gay.

We're pleased to announce that we've selected Steve Peters as the recipient of the first Perl 6 microgrant. Steve has been instrumental in helping to ensure that Perl 5 has stayed incredibly portable for the past few years. Steve's starting to turn some of his attention to Parrot. You can find details of the project he's planning in the text of his grant application:

There are several problems currently with Parrot's portability, which may inhibit its adoption as a run-anywhere VM. This problem will be a major obstacle in the Perl6-to-Parrot solutions that have been proposed.

Some of these problems include:

• Failures to successfully link a Parrot executable with gcc on Cygwin.
• Failures to successfully link a Parrot executable with icc or suncc on Linux.
• Failures to successfully link a Parrot executable with Borland C++ on Windows.

These are the failures I have personally experienced. I suspect there may be additional problems on other OSes and platforms as well since there seems to be very spotty coverage of HP-UX and Solaris based on results seen on the Parrot smoke report website.

Having worked with the Perl 5 core for a few years now, I have a good deal of experience in this area. I currently smoke test Perl on four different operating systems with seven different compilers. I have worked to get Intel C++ and Sun Studio compiling Perl without failures on Linux. I am also currently working with Sun in their early access program to test out their new Sun Studio 12 compilers on both Linux and Solaris.

For completion of this grant, I believe the following would be the bare minimum needed for a successful project.

• Successful completion of a full Cygwin compile of Parrot and application of necessary patches to Parrot. Test failures should be in line with what is observed on Linux or Mac OS X. That is clean up any test failures that seem to be platform specific to Cygwin.
• Similarly, compiling Parrot with Intel C++ and Sun Studio 12 for Linux, application of any necessary patches, and cleanup of compiler specific issues.
• Compiling Parrot with Borland C++ on Windows with application of necessary patches to the Parrot core. Cleanup of compiler specific issues with necessary additional changes patched in the Parrot core.
• Investigation into gmake "-j" support to allow for parallel building of Parrot.

Additional planned work:

• Additional cleanup for other OSes including (but not limited to) NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD.
• Testing and cleanup for Solaris (x86 and Sparc) and HP-UX if needed. As I only have guest access for the majority of these platforms, the work is dependent on continued access to these systems. As long as I have the access, though, I plan to treat this deliverable similarly to the others.

Please join us in wishing him the best of luck with his project. We're really looking forward to seeing the results of this work.

If you're interested in submitting a Perl 6 microgrant proposal, you can find details here.

Since this update is so late, I'm taking the liberty of covering three months of Parrot work, rather than two. That means this report covers February through end of April of 2007.

Parrot has been sticking to its new monthly release schedule, which means that we saw three releases in this grant period, 0.4.9, 0.4.10, and 0.4.11.

No experience with Parrot necessary.

Parrot 0.4.13 can be obtained via CPAN (soon), or follow the download instructions at http://parrotcode.org/source.html.

Parrot 0.4.13 News:

• Languages:
  • Updated Lisp, Lua, PHP ("Plumhead"), Python ("Pynie"), ABC, WMLScript, and Tcl ("ParTcl").
  • Perl 6 passes all of the sanity tests.
  • PGE supports latest Perl 6 grammar syntax. Perl 6, Python ("Pynie"), and ABC parsers updated to match.
  • Updated PHP ("Plumhead") to Antlr 3.0.
  • Lua added the beginnings of a PGE/TGE based compiler (not yet replacing the Perl/Yapp compiler).
  • Lisp updated for current features, added a test suite.
• Core Implementation:
  • Filled in features and backward compatibility for PDD 15 objects. New object metamodel passes 85% of old test suite.
  • GCC API symbols are visible externally only when explicitly exported.
  • Added generated GCC compiler attributes to increase warnings, and cleaned up resulting warnings.
  • Code cleanup efforts and fixed memory leaks by the cage cleaners, resulting in notable speed increases.
• Misc:
  • Updated Parrot distribution to Artistic License 2.0, from dual Artistic 1/GPL license.
  • SDL examples brought up-to-date with current features.

Thanks to all our contributors for making this possible, and our sponsors for supporting this project.

Enjoy!
Allison

Allison Randal informs us that she has "...just signed an agreement with O'Reilly that assigns the full copyright in the book Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials to The Perl Foundation. The text is out-of-date, but can be updated much more rapidly than it can be rewritten from scratch." The contents of the book will soon be available via the perl.org Subversion server (svn.perl.org).

Many thanks to O'Reilly for this generous gift to the Perl community, and to the original authors for their hard work in producing the book in the first place.

The moved wiki workspaces are:

• http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/ -- Perl 6
• http://www.perlfoundation.org/parrot/ -- Parrot
• http://www.perlfoundation.org/hackathon-chicago/ -- The 2006 hackathon in Chicago
• http://www.perlfoundation.org/hackathon-toronto/ -- The 2007 hackathon in Toronto

Three more Perl 6 Microgrants have been awarded!

Jesse Vincent of Best Practical writes:

Flavio Glock will receive a travel microgrant to help him attend YAPC::EU and evangelize kp6 and the Perl 6 in Perl 6 effort.

Steve Pritchard will receive a microgrant to complete the RPM packaging of Parrot and Pugs for Fedora, and to submit those packages for inclusion in the official Fedora distribution. Steve will be blogging his progress at http://blog.stevecoinc.com/

Juerd Waalboer is the maintainer of feather.perl6.nl, the primary host for Pugs development. Juerd will receive a microgrant to purchase upgraded hardware for feather.

Five Perl 6 microgrants remain to be awarded, so if you've got a good idea, we want to hear about it. You can find out how to submit a proposal here: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2007/03/msg122448.html.