Recently in Perl 6 Development Category

Below is an overview of the programs that were financially supported by The Perl Foundation in 2010. Programs are roughly broken up into 3 categories: Events, Marketing, and Development.

Perl events

The Perl Foundation supported four conferences in 2010. Those conferences were: The North American Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC::NA), Frozen Perl, The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, and The Perl Oasis. Each event is expected to be self-sustaining through program fees and donations. However, TPF did provide support to each event in the form of free services. Event organizers were able to pick and choose which services they needed:

• Use of the donate.perlfoundation.org payment gateway for the various events to receive registration fees and sponsorship contributions. Each event received 100% of the amount contributed, any transaction fees were covered by TPF. In the course of a year this works out to over $2,500 in event sponsorship.
• Event liability insurance, which is often required by event venues. The liability policy costs TPF over $1,000 to maintain per year.
• Use of TPF as an established legal entity when required to enter into contracts with event venues and contractors. This freed event organizers from needing to spend time and expenses related to establishing their own organizations for each event.
• Handling all disbursements to venues, caterers, contractors, speakers, etc.. All postage, wire transaction fees, and accounting expenses were covered by TPF, which cost over $500 in 2010.

In 2010, The Perl Foundation provided a $500 sponsorship of the Enlightened Perl Organization's "Send-a-newbie" program for YAPC::EU. TPF also provided a $500 sponsorship for YAPC::NA's "VIP party", an event targeted at first-time YAPC attendees.

Perl marketing

In 2010, The Perl Foundation provided $1,000 in free printed marketing materials distributed by volunteers staffing Perl advocacy booths at various non-Perl events through the year.

TPF also paid $1,600 to have professional content continuously written for the perl.com web site through the year.

In 2010, TPF spent $1,800 for trademark applications in Canada, Europe, and Japan. The Perl Foundation now holds trademarks on Perl in both the United States and Canada.

Perl development

The Perl Foundation maintained their associate membership with The Unicode Consortium in 2010 at an expense of $1,500. This membership enhances Perl developers' abilities to maintain support of Unicode within Perl. It also gives Perl a voice in contributing to the ongoing development of the Unicode Standard.

Through a development grant made possible by Ian Hague in 2008, TPF paid over $14,000 in grants for the further development of Perl 6 in 2010. At the end of this year, there is $27,000 remaining unallocated in the Perl 6 development portion of the Hague grant. Grants completed this year included:

• Jonathan Worthington's "Rakudo Signature Improvements"
• Solomon Foster's "Numeric and Real Support"
• Travel support for Patrick Michaud to speak about Rakudo and recruit volunteers at conferences.

TPF was awarded a $50,000 grant from Booking.com for "further development and
maintenance of the Perl programming language". TPF has used $25,800 of those funds in the form of monthly payments to David Mitchell for his grant "Fixing Perl5 Core Bugs." This grant will be continued into 2011.

The grants committee paid over $6,000 in grants from community contributions. The following grants were completed in 2010:

• Ricardo Signes' "Archive::Zip bugs" and "Improve Dist::Zilla's Tests, Documentation, and Structure"
• Vadim Konovalov's "Perl Cross-Compilation for WinCE and Linux" and "Tcl/Tk Access in Rakudo"
• Curtis Jewell's "Corporate, Embedded, and Multi-user Perl on Windows"
• Gerard Goossen's "Changing the Perl 5 optree build process into a Abstract Syntax Tree generation and a code generation step"
• Leon Timmermans' "Embeding Perl into C++ Applications"
• Sebastian Riedel's "The Mojo Documentation Project"
• Kieren Diment's "The Perl Survey"
• José Castro and Bruno Martins' "Perlbal documentation"

In 2010, The Perl Foundation in cooperation with The Parrot Foundation sponsored 10 projects in The Google Summer of Code. TPF provided over $1,600 in support for this program, which will eventually be recovered back from Google.

Looking ahead to 2011

In 2011, we expect our areas of support to remain roughly the same. We remain committed to supporting Perl events, marketing, and development.

How you can help

Improved fundraising is a requirement to maintain the strong support of Perl provided by The Perl Foundation in 2011. If you find value in the work that is being support by TPF, please consider making a donation. To contribute, please visit https://donate.perlfoundation.org

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to announce the July 2010 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the July 2010 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/star/downloads.

Rakudo Star is aimed at "early adopters" of Perl 6. We know that it still has some bugs, it is far slower than it ought to be, and there are some advanced pieces of the Perl 6 language specification that aren't implemented yet. But Rakudo Perl 6 in its current form is also proving to be viable (and fun) for developing applications and exploring a great new language. These "Star" releases are intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to programmers, grow the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback about the Perl 6 language and Rakudo's implementation of it.

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language ("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as "Rakudo Perl". "Rakudo Star" is a distribution that includes release #31 of the Rakudo Perl 6 "compiler, version 2.6.0 of the Parrot Virtual Machine, and various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community. We plan to make Rakudo Star releases on a monthly schedule, with occasional special releases in response to important bugfixes or changes.

Some of the many cool Perl 6 features that are available in this release of Rakudo Star:

• Perl 6 grammars and regexes
• formal parameter lists and signatures
• metaoperators
• gradual typing
• a powerful object model, including roles and classes
• lazy list evaluation
• multiple dispatch
• smart matching
• junctions and autothreading
• operator overloading (limited forms for now)
• introspection
• currying
• a rich library of builtin operators, functions, and types
• an interactive read-evaluation-print loop
• Unicode at the codepoint level
• resumable exceptions

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases. Thus, we do not consider Rakudo Star to be a "Perl 6.0.0" or "1.0" release.

In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are welcomed.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. Rakudo Star also contains a draft of a Perl 6 book -- see in the release tarball.

The development team thanks all of the contributors and sponsors for making Rakudo Star possible. If you would like to contribute, see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help, ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list, or join us on IRC #perl6 on freenode.

Rakudo Star releases are created on a monthly cycle or as needed in response to important bug fixes or improvements. The next planned release of Rakudo Star will be on August 24, 2010.

Editor's notes

For questions, contact Perl Foundation Public Relations at pr@perlfoundation.org.

Perl

Perl is a dynamic programming language created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. Perl borrows features from a variety of other languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, sed and Lisp. It is distributed with practically every version of Unix available and runs on a huge number of platforms, as diverse as Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, z/OS, os400, QNX and Symbian.

The Perl Foundation

The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code. It is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization incorporated in Holland, Michigan, USA in 2000.

It is with great pleasure to announce the approval of the latest Ian Hague grant for Perl 6 development, entitled 'Traits, Introspection and More Dispatch Work For Rakudo.' This grant goes to Jonathan Worthington, who has already successfully finished one Hague grant. The grant manager for this grant will be Patrick Michaud, the lead architect of Rakudo Perl 6, the Perl 6 implementation effort on top of the Parrot virtual machine.

We thank Jonathan for his grant application and we look forward to its success. Jonathan will keep the Perl community informed of his progress on this grant work through the Rakudo.org blog and in his own use.perl.org journal.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the call for feedback regarding this grant application. Your feedback is essential in the decision process regarding Hague grants.

Coming off the completion of his first Hague grant, Jonathan Worthington has submitted a request for a new Ian Hague Perl 6 development grant for his proposal "Traits, Introspection and More Dispatch Work For Rakudo". A part of the Hague grant process is that submitted grant requests may, as opted by the submitter, be provided for public and community comment.

Jonathan's grant request is included here, below. Any interested Perl community members may provide their comments regarding this grant request here.

In late November 2007 Jonathan Worthington submitted a Hague Perl 6 Grant proposal entitled 'Rakudo Dispatch and Role Enhancements'. I am pleased to announce that Jonathan submitted his final Hague grant report yesterday (included below the fold), and it was approved and accepted by chromatic, the grant manager for the grant. This successfully completes this Hague Grant for Perl 6 development. We thank Jonathan for his great work on this grant and his efforts in advancing the goal of a completed Perl 6 implementation.

(The following message was written by Jonathan Leto, TPF's organizer-in-chief for GSoC 2009. TPF gives its warmest thanks to Jonathan for all his work on GSoC 2009.)

I have the extreme pleasure to announce that the Google Summer of Code
2009 has officially started and The Perl Foundation will be mentoring
9 students this year in a variety of projects. A breakdown of each
student project and mentor with links to the project abstract can be
found at [1]. If you would like to keep up with recent updates, then
subscribe to this RSS feed [2]. If you would like to get a little more
involved, come join us in #soc-help on irc.perl.org or join the
tpf-gsoc-students list [3].

[1] http://leto.net/dukeleto.pl/2009/04/google-announces-nine-students-in-gsoc2009-with-the-perl-fou.html
[2] http://leto.net/dukeleto.pl/atom.xml
[3] http://groups.google.com/group/tpf-gsoc-students

Thanks to everyone involved, including students with projects that
were not accepted. We had a limited number of spots and some very good
applications could not be accepted. With a bit more spit and polish
some would be a great fit for a TPF grant. Thank you to everyone who
applied, and if you did not get accepted this year, you can still
implement your project and become part of the community, without
getting paid. I promise, we don't bite.

Stay tuned for further updates.

On November 20, 2008, Jonathan Worthington submitted an Ian Hague Perl 6 development grant request entitled Rakudo Dispatch and Role Enhancements.

Public comments regarding this grant request were extremely positive. These, in addition to consultation with Jesse Vincent (Perl 6 project manager) and Patrick Michaud (Rakudo project lead), allow The Perl Foundation to enthusiastically accept this grant request. chromatic has agreed to volunteer as the grant manager for this grant, and TPF gladly accepts his help with this. He is both diligent and exceptionally knowledgeable in the subject area and will do an excellent job of helping TPF evaluate Jonathan's progress.

We look forward to Jonathan's success with this grant work over the next few months and are excited about how this work will help advance Perl 6 implementation.