Google Summer of Code is a program that offers stipends to student developers for writing code for open source software projects. Last year we had nine projects accepted and we would love to have more this year.

Jonathan Leto is our chief organizer and he is looking for mentors and project ideas. The deadline for student applications is the 9th April and and if you are interested in working with us please join our IRC channel, #soc-help on irc.perl.org, and the mailing list.

This time I am closing two grants from Vadim Konovalov: Tcl/Tk Access in Rakudo and Perl Cross-Compilation for WinCE and Linux. We, at TPF, know that Vadim did some work on both grants (mostly on the first), but the grants were accepted in September 2008 and Vadim stopped answering emails and giving feedback a lot of time ago.

We hope Vadim will continue his work whenever he has the motivation and the time, but TPF can't keep the grant open more time.

The 5 main points of my grant, as far as releasing an improved Strawberry Perl, were:

"Is compiled as a "merge module" (.msm) file that can be included in other .msi files, as well as an independent .msi file."

This was done as of the January 2010 release of Strawberry Perl, although I'm not publicizing it heavily until the April 2010 release.

However, the "Strawberry Perl Professional" alpha that was released in late February uses the merge module that was generated by the January 2010 release as its "underpinnings", and the currently-released-on-CPAN development versions of the Perl::Dist::WiX/Perl::Dist::Strawberry creation toolchain can create and use merge modules.

"Can have the base drive (and possibly directory name) passed in to the merge module."

It turns out that you insert the merge module under a directory entry, so completing the merge module made this automatic. However, this isn't useful without the next point.

"Can be installed to any drive (the top directory may still be named "strawberry" under the root of the selected drive)"

This is what I'm working on currently for the April 2010 release, as well as being able to build a 64-bit version of Strawberry Perl (for 5.11.x+ versions of Perl - which means a non-beta 64-bit version may not be available until May or June)

The intention is to release a beta with this (I think of it as "relocatability") working soon after 5.11.6 or 5.12.0-RC1 is released.

Unfortunately, I've hit a bug in Perl 5.10.1 - it doesn't relocate the vendor/lib directory like the other two standard directories: http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=73562 . I'll need some assistance (i.e. a patch that fixes that bug, or guidance from p5p if more information is needed) in order to get 5.10.1 to relocate safely.

5.11.5 relocates all 3 standard directories, so it's fine, and I can test that relocation works with 5.11.x versions, until a patch can be created for 5.10.1.

"Separates the modules installed with the initial installation from modules that the user / administrator installs, by using the "vendor" directories for module installation that can be configured when compiling Perl."

This was done in the October 2009 release of Strawberry Perl. This has created a problem with implementing the relocation portion of the grant, as noted above.

"Includes a script that saves the settings that local::lib creates within the Windows Registry."

A first draft of this is currently in Adam Kennedy's svn repository (it needs debugged) as http://svn.ali.as/cpan/trunk/App-local-lib-Win32Helper/

After that, all that remains is to react to the results of the pilot, run the survey proper, and analyze the final data gathered from it.

The source code is currently visible on GitHub.

Before the Board votes on this proposal we would like to get feedback and endorsements from the Perl community. Please leave feedback in the comments or send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org.

Project Title:

Numeric and Real Support

Synopsis:

This grant aims to refactor Rakudo's current numeric classes to support the
Perl 6 specification's new Numeric and Real roles, in the process making it
easier to create new numeric classes.

Benefits to Perl 6 Development:

In late 2009, in response to users' and developers' experiences with Rakudo,
the Perl 6 specification was enhanced with the creation of the Numeric and
Real roles. This grant's purpose would be to implement those roles and
refactor Rakudo's core numeric type implementations to work with them,
including Int, Rat, Num, and Complex. Special care will be taken to simplify
adding new classes that fill the Numeric and Real roles, as there are more in
the specification that will need to be implemented at some point. In addition,
the relevant portions of the test suite would be revamped. Straightening this
all out before Rakudo * will present the newcomers to Perl 6 with a clean,
consistent numerical interface instead of the current obsolete hodgepodge.

Deliverables:

D1. Implement Numeric. [S32::Numeric: "Numeric"]
D2. Implement Real. [S32::Numeric: "Real"]
D3. Refactor Int, Rat, and Num to be Real. [S32::Numeric: "Int", "Rat", and
"Num", also S02::Bits and Pieces]
D4. Refactor Complex to be Numeric. [S32::Numeric: "Complex"]
D5. Refactor the trig functions to fit in this scheme. [S32::Numeric:
"Trigonometric functions"]
D6. Add Numeric and Real specific tests to the spectests.
D7. Enhance our current numeric tests to better work in the new system.

Project Details:

D1 and D2 require implementing a the Real and Numeric roles, and possibly
modifying the Spec a bit in the process. Probably the biggest issue here is
working out to what extent Real should implement default versions of its
methods.

D3, D4, and D5 involve refactoring the existing methods for these classes to
fit into the new role-based scheme. Special attention will be given to
facilitating the addition of new numeric types which fill these roles.

D6 would include simple tests -- do the classes belong to their appropriate
roles? -- as well as more complex tests -- can users readily create their own
Numeric class?

D7 would reorganize the existing numeric tests to better take advantage of the
new system, as well as forking role-based versions of those tests.

Project Schedule:

This is envisioned as a two-month project. The first three weeks would be spent
establishing the basic framework and getting the Numeric methods in place for
Int, Rat, Num, and Complex. The second three weeks would be spent working on
the Real methods for those classes. The last two weeks would be set aside for
trig.

I am able to begin work on this project at any time.

Report Schedule:

Blog posts every other week on a new Perl 6 programming blog on Wordpress,
also to be submitted to Perl Planet Six.

Public Repository:

All code, documentation and other relevant files that relate to Rakudo will be
checked into the Rakudo repository. All contributions to the specification and
specification tests will be checked into the Pugs repository.

Grant Deliverables ownership/copyright and License Information:

All work on produced as a result of this grant will be licensed under the
Artistic License Version 2.0. I already have signed the relevant CLA for The
Perl Foundation.

Bio:

After flirting briefly with Pugs back in its very early days, I started
regular experimentation with Perl 6 via Rakudo in late 2008. In mid-2009 I
started contributing, first to the spectests and then in August to Rakudo
itself. Since then I have been the third most active Rakudo committer,
including extensive work on Rat, Complex, and trig support.

I have an MS in mathematics and a BS with honors in mathematics and computer
science, both from the University of Michigan. I have twelve years' experience
as a professional C++ library developer.

Country of Residence:

United States

Nationality:

United States

Amount Requested:

$3000

Okay to publish proposal?:

Yes

Suggestions for Grant Manager:

Jonathan Worthington

Ingy wrote a report on the work done. It can be read at https://www.socialtext.net/yaml/index.cgi?requiem_for_a_grant

The five rejected grants are:
* Creating a ctypes-Like Interface for Perl to External Subroutines by Shlomi Fish
* Enhancing CPANHQ by Shlomi Fish
* perl core memory improvements by Jim Cromie
* Enhancing Perl 6 Pattern Matching by Morris M. Siegel
* CPAN Reviews by Alexandr Ciornii

The grant kept for new evaluation in the next round:
* Perl Compiler by Reini urban

And finally, congratulations to Ricardo Signes for his accepted grant:
* Improve Dist::Zilla by Ricardo Signes

These results took in consideration the proposal texts and the work relevance for the Perl community, the proposal authors curriculum and interaction with the Perl community, and the comments and reactions from the Perl community on this blog.

Introduction

A while back, I filed an application for a grant to work on a wide range of improvements to Rakudo's signature, capture and binding implementation, in order to improve performance, bring us in line with the specification and implement a range of features that we did not have support for.

I have now completed the grant tasks, and am filing this report to discuss the work that was done under it. I have missed the originally planned schedule for the grant to be completed. This was in a large part due to a lot of Rakudo development since October taking place in a branch, ng, which set out to refactor and improve many aspects of Rakudo and get us in good shape for the Rakudo * release in a couple of months time. It made far more sense to implement some aspects of this grant in the branch rather than in master, and the branch also needed my attention in other key areas. The branch has recently become master, and since then I've been able to complete the final pieces of the grant and bring it to completion.

Deliverables Status

I proposed six deliverables, and have completed all of them.

D1 called for an extensive refactoring of signature internals and parameter binding. Rakudo now has a single custom signature binder, designed to handle its binding needs in accordance with the Perl 6 specification. This is a far better situation than before, where we used the Parrot binder and then layered extra binding semantics atop of it, meaning we had to make two passes through the parameters.

Having our own custom binder that takes into account the needs of Perl 6 has made it possible to do all of the other items in this grant in a clean and performant way. It has also enabled other bits of progress outside the scope of the grant; for example, I was able to get a first cut of coercion (the "as" trait) of parameters in signatures implemented in little over half an hour a few days ago.

We also have compile-time objects to represent signatures and parameters in the compiler. This has allowed much cleaner code in the actions that build the AST. In the future, this approach will also be highly useful for building extra static checking and an optimizer.

D2 required implementing support for binding named arguments to positional parameters. I considered this in the initial re-design of the binder, so it just worked "out of the box" once I switched Rakudo over to using it.

The target of D3 - unpacking of arguments - was made much easier by having a custom binder. The binder was designed to be re-entrant, and therefore unpacking arguments was implemented by specifying how various data structures could coerce themselves into a capture, and then making a recursive call with the capture that was produced.

For D4, I spent some time re-working capture support overall, and as well as being able to write a capture into a signature - and to unpack it with a sub-signature - we can also interpolate a capture into the arguments for a call. Before this didn't really work - it would lose the named parameters, for example.

Implementing D5 - support for multiple return values - first meant working with Larry to figure out the correct semantics. It turned out they were easier to get in place in the refactored "ng" branch - which has now become the master branch. I also implemented the support for binding the return values against a signature; this means all the power of unpacking arguments is available for returns too. It's all routed through the same underlying binder implementation.

Finally, for D6 I first put a proposal into the specification for how signature introspection should look, then wrote an implementation and reviewed the test coverage.

Dissemination

I have written some blog posts (1, 2, 3) about the work that I have done under this grant. I've also been active on the #perl6 IRC channel and, thanks to the evalbot, been able to give some demonstrations of the improvements there too. I also continue to attend Perl conferences and give talks about Perl 6.

Conclusions

This grant has, like my previous two, brought another major piece of Rakudo essentially "up to spec" and provided a good, stable base for future development. Our coverage of S06 is vastly improved, along with performance. Overall this grant has helped us meet critical targets on the path to the Rakudo * release and, beyond that, towards Rakudo becoming a complete Perl 6 implementation.

With a planned four parallel tracks each day, there are ample open slots for talks, so be sure to submit yours today.

Remember that the conference is June 21st through 23rd 2010 at Ohio State University. Registration will be $100 ($90 early-bird), which day-passes available.