Nicholas Clark writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the August period. Multiple cores are the future! And we need to enjoy this, because we aren't going to get any choice about it. The current hardware for the hot backup for perl5.git.perl.org has 24 cores, and even mobile phones are thinking about going quad-core. The upshot of this is that the more that you can get

Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer reported: This past May, The Perl Foundation awarded a grant to fund development of a couple features in Pinto. Pinto is a robust tool for curating a private repository of CPAN modules, so you can build your application with the right modules every time. This is my second progress report on that work. The next deliverable on the grant proposal is a merge command. The idea here

Nicholas Clark writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the July period. The main theme for this month seems to be "clean up parts of the build". perl was first developed on a Unix system, back in the times when there dozens of different Unix variants. Hence portability was initially across the different C libraries Figuring out precisely what the system could do was performed by

Tony Cook writes: The most interesting changes this month were probably: "115928":https://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=115928 a common rand implementation "117265":https://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=117265 failing system calls on embedded NULs "3330":https://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=3330 warning on ++$foo when $foo isn't a number, or magically incrementable "85104":https://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=85104 preserving $^E across signal handlers

I'm pleased to announce that diakopter's grant proposal, "Wrap up Perl 5 Interop for Rakudo Perl 6 on MoarVM":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/07/hague-grant-application.html, has been accepted. I would like to thank everyone who took the time to comment on the proposal. If you would like to help fund grants like this or any of our other projects please visit our "donation system":https://secure.donor.com/pf012/give.

Tony Cook writes: The most interesting changes this month were probably: 116190 making -F imply -a and -a imply -n. 116989 S_croak_memory_wrap 117265 safesyscalls 74798 Data::Dumper XS I added tests and fix for that, and applied it as 2780a6ed. Of course this being Data::Dumper, a change in the code broke some tests on CPAN, in one case a tweak to the output format to match the pure perl code exactly

We have received a new grant application, under the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund, from David Mitchell. Before we vote 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. Name: David Mitchell Project Title: Maintaining the Perl 5 Core Synopsis Having recently finished a three-year TPF grant devoted

Tony Cook writes: The most interesting changes this month were probably: 116190 making -F imply -a and -a imply -n. 116989 S_croak_memory_wrap 117265 safesyscalls 74798 Data::Dumper XS The original request in this ticket was that -F without -a should warn or fail with an error. The problem with that, as discussed, is that there's a perfectly reasonable thing to do instead: have -F switch on

I am pleased to announce that Dr Nicholas Clark's "Improving Perl 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/08/grant-proposal-improving-perl.html grant has been extended by another 400 hours. I would like to thank everyone who commented on his "request for an extension":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/07/grant-extension-request---impr-4.html for their feedback. I would also like to thank all those who continue to provide financial support to the "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund.":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund

Nicholas Clark writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the June period. bq. The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from I guess the same can be said about build systems. So the structural intent of the build is Permit the user to choose configuration options Build the package so the configuration system has to run using native tools. And

Nicholas Clark writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the May period. This month I simplified part of the implementation of pack and unpack, removing about 130 lines of code, and reducing the object code size by about 2K. The only casualty was support for mixed-endian systems. Sorry, PDP-11 users. In the medal stakes for "risk to sanity", the implementation of pack and unpack are strong

We have received the following Hague Grant application from diakopter. Before we vote on this proposal we would like to have a period of community consultation for 10 days. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org. Applicant's Name: diakopter Project Title Wrap up Perl 5 Interop for Rakudo Perl 6 on MoarVM Synopsis Embed Perl 5 in Rakudo's

Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer reported: This past May, The Perl Foundation awarded a grant to fund development of a couple features in Pinto. Pinto is a robust tool for curating a private repository of CPAN modules, so you can build your application with the right modules every time. This is my first progress report on that work. The grant proposal covered two key features. I have a tendency to pick the

Dr. Nicholas Clark has requested an extension of $20,000 for his "Improving Perl 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/08/grant-proposal-improving-perl.html grant. This grant started in September 2011 and has been running successfully since then. The requested extension would allow Nicholas to devote another 400 hours to the project. The funds for this extension would come from the "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund. As well as weekly reports posted on the p5p mailing list Nicholas provides detailed

I am pleased to announce that The Perl Foundation has accepted Tony Cook's grant application for "Maintaining Perl 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/05/grant-application-maintaining.html. As always the application was considered after a public consultation and feedback period. I would like to thank everyone who took the time to view, assess, and provide feedback on the application. This grant was awarded from money previously raised for the "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund, an initiative maintained by

Nicholas Clark writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the April period. I started the month looking at the Unicode Names code. At Karl's suggestion I changed it to parse the UnicodeData.txt file properly. Previously it had hardcoded various constants, particularly related to the CJK ideographs and Hangul syllables. The CJK ranges in Unicode have increased in the past, and so it's possible that they will

Dave Mitchell writes: This month was mostly spent on removing global state from the regex engine, making re-entrantcy less error-prone. The extract from the merge commit description below gives you all the details you could ever want. Apart from that I spent a few hours re-enabling Copy-on_Write by default post the 5.18.0 release, plus a few other bits and pieces. It turns out that I have finally used up all

Dave Mitchell writes: This month I worked on three 5.18 blocker tickets; all three being regressions related to my jumbo re_eval fix back in 5.17.1. The first, which I continued working on from last month, was the "Regexp::Grammars" bug. Basically, my reworking of the implementation assumed that a constant string segment like "foo" in /foo..../ would indeed be constant; but in the presence of bc. use overload::constant qr sub bless

Nicholas Clark has requested an extension of $20,000 for his "Improving Perl 5 grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/08/grant-proposal-improving-perl.html. This grant has been running since September 2011 and is on track to finish successfully this month. The requested extension would allow Nicholas to devote another 400 hours to the project. Nicholas provides detailed monthly reports and the recent ones can be found in the following blog posts: "June 2012":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/07/improving-perl-5-grant-report-7.html "July 2012":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/09/improving-perl-5-grant-report-8.html "August 2012":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/09/improving-perl-5-grant-report-9.html "September 2012":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/10/improving-perl-5-grant-report-10.html

Nicholas Clark writes: In September I finally emerged from the rabbit hole of PL_main_start, that I entered into at some point in mid July. Father Chrysostomos has refactored OP allocation to always use a slab allocator, as part of fixing some very long standing bugs to do with OPs. At the start of parsing, a new slab is allocated. While parsing is ongoing, the slab is "owned" by the CV