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

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the September period. This month I mostly spent my time: 1> Making regexes only copy the needed part of a string. In general when a regex is executed, and it is seen that captures exist or implicitly in the presence of or then perl makes a copy of the string that was matched against, so that subsequent

The Perl Foundation is looking at giving some grants ranging from $500 to $2000 in November 2012. You don't have to have a large, complex, or lengthy project. You don't even have to be a Perl master or guru. If you have a good idea and the means and ability to accomplish it, we want to hear from you! Do you have something that could benefit the Perl community but

Shlomi Fish reported: 2012-Sep-08: Added a test for the w command for setting a watch expression. Added a test for theW command for removing a watch expression. Added a test for the W command for removing all watch expressions. Added a test for theocommand Added a test for theo anyoption?command. Added a test for theo option=value` command. Added a test for the Added a

Nicholas Clark writes: A fair chunk of the month was taken up with investigating three related areas: How code such as -e 'BEGIN {1}' is compiled, and the interaction between PL_main_cv, CvSTART PL_main_root and PL_main_start Code in op.c which calls CopLINE_set and warnings from multi-line constructions Building with -DPERL_DEBUG_READONLY_OPS to force shared ops to be read-only, and determining the causes of code trying to write to read-only ops Of these,

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the July/August period. I spent a bit of time fixing a few issues causes by my rewriting of the implementation, then started to look into the last unclosed ticket still attached to the re_eval meta-ticket. This concerns code within that modifies the string being matched against, and generally causes assertion failures or coredumps: bc. my $text "a";

Enrique Nell and Joaquin Ferrero reported: Project status: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkmrG_9Q4x15dC1MNWloU0lyUjhGa2NrdTVTOG5WZVE CPAN distribution: http://search.cpan.org/~enell/POD2-ES-5.16.1.02/ Project host: https://github.com/zipf/perldoc-es This month we updated POD2::ES from v5.16.0 to v5.16.1. It was a swift operation, since only one document changed Translated files not included in the distribution were also updated to v5.16.1. As mentioned in a previous report, v5.16.0 fixed the issues that prevented displaying correctly the extended characters in UTF-8 encoded files using perldoc in

Shlomi Fish reported: 2012-Sep-01: Plans for today: 1. Report the segfaults in Devel::Cover. Done: https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=79338 2. Add more tests. 3. Respond to this message by Rocky Bernstein: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/08/msg191414.html Done: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/09/msg191426.html 4. Blog about the grant on my blogs.perl.org blog Also mention the new CPAN distributions I have uploaded. Mention the fact I made use of the `b feature for debugging Games-Solitaire-Verify. Done: http://blogs.perl.org/users/shlomi_fish/2012/09/grant-for-improving-the-perl-debugger-new-cpan-distributions.html 2012-Sep-02: Plans for today: Handle the correspondence

Jess Robinson writes: tool designed to make using the cross-compiled gcc similar to a normal gcc. In the end it turned out to be more of a hinderance. Getting rid of it and using Android's suggestion for "--sysroot" as a gcc option means upgrading the NDK to the latest one is now simple. The SDK is now not required at all. The last 2 weeks I was at the

Nicholas Clark writes: More fun with compilers this month, with make utilities joining in. H. Merijn Brand and I identified this problem with HP's compiler a while back, but I'd not yet had time to fix it: bc. cc -DPERL_CORE -c -Ae -D_HPUX_SOURCE -Wl,+vnocompatwarnings +DD64 DDEBUGGING -I/usr/local/include -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 +O 2 +Onolimit -g pp_sys.c cc: line 2976: panic 5172: Backend Assert Unimplemented CVT. echo 1 Of course, HP's make just

Shlomi Fish reported: 2012-Aug-28: I received the E-mail that my grant for improving the Perl debugger was accepted in the afternoon today My grant manager will be Alan Haggai Alavi, whom I talked with and successfully collaborated with in the past. I decided to start working. I checked the pending tests on my shlomif-perl-d-add-tests-take-2-may-git-burn-in-hell has given me some trouble in the past incarnation of the branch>, and after merging the