Dave Mitchell writes: I mainly spent April helping to get blead ready for release; in particular by trying to reduce smoke failures and by looking at 5.20 blocker tickets, including: Get PERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT and PERL_GLOBAL_STRUCT_PRIVATE builds to smoke successfully under ithreads: there were a number of race conditions. Fix a race condition in File-Glob/t/basic.t that caused occasional smoke failures. Stop t/run/locale.t from producing spurious warnings under some shells. Make ExtUtils::Install handle

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 16 tickets were reviewed or otherwise worked on. This is the start of my third grant. I mostly worked on 5.20 blockers for this week. |Hours Activity 0.37 #116296 review 1.52 #116925 research and write documentation, comment twice 0.08 #120670 comment and resolve 0.47 #120939 review latest patch and comment 0.45 #121198 work on patch to make croaks into warnings 0.35 #121335 comment 0.33 review 5.20

I would like to congratulate "Pattawan Kaewduangdee":http://oiami.blogspot.jp/ on her successful application to work with Perl in the current round of the "Outreach Program for Women":https://gnome.org/opw/. Pattawan will begin her internship working on "MetaCPAN":https://metacpan.org/ on May 19th with "Olaf Alders":http://blogs.perl.org/users/olaf_alders/ as her mentor. We wouldn't be able to take part in this program without the support of our sponsors or the support of the mentors. I would like to thank Olaf

Paul Johnson writes: In accordance with the terms of my grant from TPF this is the monthly report for my work on improving Devel::Cover covering March 2014. Those of you who have been paying close attention may have noticed that it has been some months since my last report. Unfortunately I got rather busy and Devel::Cover work was one of the casualties. However, with the approval of my grant managers

I am pleased to announce that Tony Cook's grant "Maintaining Perl 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2014/03/grant-extension-request-from-t.html grant has been extended by another 400 hours. Thank you to everyone who responded to the call for comments and who provided feedback on this grant extension. 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.

Dave Mitchell writes: Apart from a bit of time spent on a few miscellaneous bugs, I mainly continued working on refactoring re_intuit_start During the course of the month I merged two sets of commits back into blead. At this point I have now audited the whole of the body of code for general correctness, and in particular for utf8 bugs and inefficiencies, and for correct treatment of anchors, especially \G.

As his "Maintaining the Perl 5 Core":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/09/grant-application-maintaining-1.html grant is about to be successfully completed, Dave Mitchell has requested an extension of $20,000. This will allow him to dedicate another 400 hours to this work. During this grant he sent weekly reports to the p5p mailing list as well as providing monthly summary reports that have been published on this blog, the most recent of which are linked below: "Report for

It is my pleasure to announce that "Booking.com":http://www.booking.com/ approached Karen Pauley, President of The Perl Foundation, to announce further sponsorship of the "Perl5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund. Booking.com have been generous contributors and supporters of this fund since its inception and this latest generous support is for the incredible amount of €10,000 Booking.com have sponsored Perl events and initiatives for many years and have also been host to Perl events at

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent about half my time last month continuing to work on fixing and refactoring the Perl_re_intuit_start function, which is the main run-time optimisation facility in the regex engine. My work so far was merged back into blead on 8th February; I've since done some more work which hasn't been pushed yet. I also fixed a regression in maint-5.18 regarding whether a variable is seen in a

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 57 tickets were worked on, and 12 patches were applied. Probably the most interesting issue this month was diagnosing the HP-UX bus error in during regexp compilation, I won't repeat the diagnosis here, but it can be found at: "http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2014/02/msg212925.html":http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2014/02/msg212925.html with some on-point follow-ups from Nicholas Clark, Dave Mitchell and Yves Orton. This month brings the total hours spent on my second grant to 265.07 hours,

Tony Cook has requested an extension of $20,000 for his "Maintaining Perl 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/05/grant-application-maintaining.html grant. This grant has been running successfully since July 2013. The requested extension would allow Tony 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. Before we make a decision on this extension we would like to have a period of community consultation that

I am pleased to announce that we will once again be taking part in the "Outreach Program for Women.":https://wiki.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen/2014/MayAugust#Participating_Organizations The application period is now open for women looking for a summer internship working on a Perl related project. The internship will take place from May 19th to August 18th 2014. The internship pays a stipend of $5,500 and the intern is expected to work full-time on the project. The deadline

I am pleased to announce that Ricardo Signes' "grant application":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2014/01/perl-5-grant-application-trave-2.html and David Golden's "QA Hackathon Travel Grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2014/02/perl-5-grant-application-trave-3.html application have been successful. I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on these grants. The grants were awarded from our "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund. If you wish to contribute to this fund please go to our "donation system":https://secure.donor.com/pf012/give or contact karen perlfoundation.org The "QA Hackathon":http://act.qa-hackathon.org/qa2014/ is a free of charge

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent the majority of my time last month continuing to work on fixing and refactoring the Perl_re_intuit_start function, which is the main run-time optimisation facility in the regex engine. Part of my goal has been to simplify the structure of the code, which uses no large-scale structural features like while-loops, but instead relies on lots of labels and goto's. Ignoring the three "go here on failure"

Tony Cook writes Approximately 45 tickets were worked on, and 13 patches were applied. I finally found the cause of and fixed

We have received the following Perl 5 grant application from David Golden. Before we vote on this proposal we would like to have a period of community consultation that will last seven days. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org. Name David Golden Project Title Perl QA Hackathon 2014 Amount Requested $1200 Synopsis This grant will be used

Mark Keating writes: The Perl Foundation are participating as a mentor organization in GSoC 2014! Student applications may be submitted starting March 10th and are due by March 21st, but students should start getting involved with their communities and the "TPF Summer of Code Students mailing list":https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/tpf-gsoc-students and start thinking about project ideas now. You can see a list of project ideas "here":http://wiki.enlightenedperl.org/gsoc2014/ideas. NOTE: Students are encouraged to come up

We are pleased to announce that Makoto Nozaki has been elected as the new Secretary of the Grants Committee. Makoto has a background in project management and has been an integral part of the Grants Committee as a Grant Manager, where all of his managed grants have been completed successfully. The outgoing Secretary, Alberto Simões, has held this position since October 2007. We would like to thank Alberto for his

We have received the following Perl 5 grant application from Ricardo Signes. Before we vote on this proposal we would like to have a period of community consultation that will last seven days. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org. Name Ricardo Signes Project Title Perl QA Hackathon 2014 Amount Requested $1200 Synopsis This grant will be used

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 30 tickets were worked on, and 10 patches were applied. "perl #120384":https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=120384 This month I re-worked Data::Dumper's pure-perl and XS output of hash keys to be consistent with both each other, and with the Quotekeys configuration. "perl #82948":https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=82948 Also on Data::Dumper, I modified the code that dumps qr// objects to output them as qr/original re/flags rather than the qr/ form that tends to expand each time

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent the majority of my time last month working on a function called Perl_re_intuit_start in the regex engine. This function is one of the major optimisations in the regex engine. For each compiled pattern, it is noted what is the longest fixed and floating strings that must appear in the string for the match to succeed, along with what char class the pattern must start with.

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent the majority of my time last month fixing compiler warnings in smokes; along with fixing a few bugs, "working" my p5p mailbox etc. Over the last month I have averaged 17.1 hours per week. As of 2013/11/30: since the beginning of the grant: bq. 6.9 weeks 115.6 total hours 16.8 average hours per week There are 284 hours left on the grant. bq. 7:55 RT#119847

I am pleased to announce that Dave Mitchell's grant application, "Maintaining the Perl 5 Core":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/09/grant-application-maintaining-1.html, was accepted. This is his first report. Dave Mitchell writes: I spent my time mainly working on several bug reports, applying patches, fixing smokes, and "working" my p5p mailbox etc. None of the fixes are particularly noteworthy. Over the last month I have averaged 16.1 hours per week. As of 2013/10/31: since the beginning of

Tony Cook has requested an extension of $13,000 for his "Maintaining Perl 5 grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/05/grant-application-maintaining.html. This grant was started in July 2013 and was successfully completed. The requested extension would allow Tony to devote another 260 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. Tony provided detailed monthly reports of the work he completed and these can be found in the

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

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

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

We have received the following grant application, under the "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund, from Tony Cook. 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. Project Title: Maintaining Perl 5 Name: Tony Cook Synopsis Free up one of the Perl 5 core's contributors to

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 writes: gcc 4.8.0 was released on 22nd March. This version of gcc has integrated Address Sanitizer, a Google project to provide a fast runtime heap and stack validation tool. I set it off building gcc from source, which pleasingly worked first time on the system I chose for the task. In turn blead built with it without problems, which is good in itself, and a known good starting

TPF is looking for contributions to the Outreach Program for Women and I am pleased to announce that Renée Bäcker has started us off with a pledge of 1000 Euros. Together with existing funding this gets us one intern so far in the first round, and a opening for the second. Now we need additional generous donations to keep this rolling. If you would like to donate to this program

Dave Mitchell writes: This month I mainly worked on one of the 5.18 blocker tickets; in this case how bq. overload::constant qr sub interacts with "constant" regexes such as qr/foo/ and qr/foo if the sub replaces constant strings like "foo" with an overloaded object. It turns out this was something I hadn't anticipated in my re_eval reworking, and my code didn't handle it at all well. I'm now about 3/4

Nicholas Clark writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the February period. The first significant thing I worked on in February was a detailed review of Peter Martini's work towards an API for subroutine signatures. In particular, I wondered how much of the existing call checker hooks they could use. In turn, I wondered whether the call checker hooks were robust against some of the torture

I am pleased to announce that we will be taking part in the next round of the "Free and Open Source Outreach Program for Women.":https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen This successful program was started in 2006 by the GNOME Foundation to encourage women to participate in the FOSS community. This round of the program is open to women looking for internships between June and September of 2013. Full details of the eligibility requirements can

Dave Mitchell writes: Got out of the habit of fixing bugs for the last couple of months. Spent most of the time that I was able to devote to perl mainly doing other stuff; in particular, pumpkining the 5.14.4 security release, and trying to keep up-to-date with my p5p inbox, which seems to be a full-time job these days. Hopefully I'll be able to put lots of effort into working

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 this "request":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/02/grant-extension-request---impr-3.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.

I am pleased to announce that Ricardo Signes's "grant application":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/02/perl-5-grant-application-trave-1.html for travel to the "Perl QA Hackathon":http://2013.qa-hackathon.org/qa2013/ has been accepted. I would to thank everyone who took the time to provide feedback on this grant application. The Perl QA Hackathon is taking place in Lancaster from Friday April 12th to Sunday April 14th 2013. If you would like to contribute directly to the 2013 Perl QA Hackathon they are "accepting

Nicholas Clark writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the January period. After catching up with some of the e-mail backlog, I tried having another prod at the awkward clang/ASAN problem described last month. It turned out that I missed something. Key to replicating the problem was that one must turn on clang's optimiser. Of course, trying to debug a problem in the C code, I'd

We have received the following Perl 5 grant application from Ricardo Signes. Before we vote on this proposal we would like to have a period of community consultation that will last seven days. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org. Name Ricardo Signes Project Title Perl QA Hackathon 2013 Amount Requested: $1200 Synopsis This grant will be used

Dr. 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 started in September 2011 and is on track to finish successfully in February 2013. 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

Dave Mitchell writes: The first part of November was spent finishing off the PADRANGE optimisation and merging it into blead. Here's the commit message. After it, I'll discuss timings. bq. add PADRANGE op and $B::overlay bq. This commit implements three optimisations and one new feature. bq. The new feature is $B::overlay, which can be set to a hash ref, indexed by op address, that allows you to override the values

Nicholas Clark writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the December period. A frustrating month. Having completed the investigation into the state of hashing described in November's report, and becoming comfortable that it wasn't likely to explode without warning, I turned to dealing with the backlog of everything else. Given that I've only been able to do about 2 weeks' work in the past 2 months,

Nicholas Clark writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the November period. There was no report for October, as I wasn't able to do any work, due to an unforseen bureaucratic trip hazard. An "interesting" surprise emerged as a side effect of moving. It turned out that I need some paperwork to comply with something about three levels of prerequisites back from what I actually need

Carl Mäsak writes: This is a report on the progress that I have made with my current Hague Grant, Implementation of macros in Rakudo. We're now at the halfway point of the grant, and Rakudo has an early, working implementation of macros. Here is the status of the deliverables identified in the original report: **D1. Completed. In Rakudo, you can now declare macros just like you declare ordinary subroutines. There's

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the October period. Last month was mostly spent continuing to work on the PADRANGE optimisation. The work is actually complete now, but was finished after the end of this report's scope, so will be covered in more detail in next month's report. Apart from working the PADRANGE optimisation itself, the work triggered some other pieces of work,

I'm pleased to announce the Nicholas Clark's request for an extension to his "Improving Perl 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/08/grant-proposal-improving-perl.html grant has been approved. The extension will allow Nicholas to dedicate another 400 hours to this important work. I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on this request and to 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 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

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";

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

Patrick Michaud writes: This is an interim report for my Hague Grant on "Lists, Iterators, and Parcels":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/07/hague-grant-application-lists.html. This report has been far too long in coming; at the time of the original grant proposal it was expected that the design and implementation of Perl 6 lists and iterators was near completion, and that most of what remained to be done would be updating the documentation, tests, and Synopses. Since that

Nicholas Clark writes: The most significant activity for the month was discovering, investigating and iterating fixes for the various bugs now fixed on the branch smoke-me/require. This is the cause of the delay on making a 5.16.1 release, as Ricardo explained in "http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2012-07/msg00954.html":http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2012-07/msg00954.html and hence this report, as the issue only went public two days ago. There are two partly related problems. Both affect code which takes untrusted user data

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the June period. This month saw the final merging of my re_eval branch back into blead, and incorporated in the 5.17.1 release. This consisted of about 125 commits, spread out over a year. The remainder of the month was spent fixing some of the issues thrown up by the new implementation. Some highlights of the new implementation

I am pleased to announce that we have extended Dave Mitchell's "Fixing Perl 5 Core Bugs":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/02/grant-proposal-fixing-perl5-co.html grant and Nicholas Clark's "Improving Perl 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/08/grant-proposal-improving-perl.html grant. This will allow them both to spend another 400 hours improving the Perl 5 core. I would like to thank the community members who took time to provide feedback on this proposal and all those who have made donations to the "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund.

Jonathan Worthington writes: This is the final report for my Hague Grant on "Meta-model Improvements and Natively Typed Attributes":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/07/hague-grant-application-meta-m.html. There was also an "intermediate progress report":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/05/interim-grant-report-meta-mode.html. At the point of the intermediate progress report, a new version of NQP had been delivered. Its objects were implemented in terms of a new meta-object system, developed with the needs of Perl 6 in mind. However, at that point Rakudo had not started

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. The grant, that is currently running, is on track to finish successfully at the end of June. This extension would allow Nicholas to devote another 400 hours to the project. Details of the recent work completed can be found in the following blog posts: "March 2012":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/04/improving-perl-5-grant-report-4.html "April 2012":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/06/improving-perl-5-grant-report-5.html "May 2012":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/06/improving-perl-5-grant-report-6.html Before we make a decision on

Nicholas Clark writes: Possibly the most unexpected discovery of May was determining precisely why Merijn's HP-UX smoker wasn't able to build with certain configuration options. The output summary grid looked like this, which is most strange: @O OK F Failure extended report at the bottom@ @X Failure under TEST but not under harness@ still running or test results not available@ @Build failures during: unknown or N/A@ @c Configure, m make,

Dave Mitchell has requested an extension of $20,000 for his "Fixing Perl5 Core Bugs":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/02/grant-proposal-fixing-perl5-co.html grant. During this grant he has sent weekly reports to the p5p mailing list as well as providing monthly summary reports that have been published on this blog. He has also provided a short summary of the work he completed during his "last extension":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/10/fixing-perl5-core-bugs-grant-e.html: My previous $20K extension has, over the last 9 months, been spent

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the May period. This month I continued to rework how the code blocks in are actually invoked, and the work is mostly finished. In particular, no longer SEGV; recursive calling etc works; paren captures work correctly in the presence of recursive and nested and I also found and fixed some buggy behaviour of $^N and when backtracking

Moritz has completed his grant and provided the following closing report. Moritz Lenz writes: After working for more than a year on my "grant on exceptions":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/02/hague-grant-application-struct.html, I am now confident that I have done all that I have promised, and can now close the grant. Deliverables A short summary of what I did for each deliverable follows D1: Specification "S32::Exception":http://perlcabal.org/syn/S32/Exception.html contains my work in this area. It provides information about

I am pleased to announce that Jess Robinson's grant application, "Improving Cross compilation of Perl 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/05/grant-application-improving-cr.html, has been successful. This grant will be managed by Tom Hukins and Renee Bäcker. I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on this grant, both on our blog and during the consultation phase.

Nicholas Clark writes: The largest part of of the month was spent on various topics related to cleaning up the build process. In particular, simplifying the top-level Makefile, by removing duplication and self-recursion. On platforms that run Configure the Makefile is extracted from a shell script Makefile.SH. Most of it is written out verbatim, but there is some shell logic to generate OS or configuration specific code. In turn that

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the April period. Mostly spent the month improving how the code blocks in are actually invoked. Previously a proper entry wasn't made on the context stack, so things like caused erratic behaviour, and even seg faults. My new method makes use of the MULTICALL API rather than having its own hand-rolled implementation, so it benefits from code

I am pleased to announce that Paul Johnson's grant application, "Improving Devel::Cover":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/04/grant-application-improving-de.html, has been successful. The grant will be split in two phases, the second phase starting after the completion of the first. I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on this grant, both on our blog and during the consultation phase.

We have received the following grant application under the "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund from Jess Robinson. 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: Jess Robinson Project Title: Improving Cross compilation of Perl 5 Synopsis: Perl 5 has several scripts and tools

Nicholas Clark writes: A short report this month as less work got done, due to illness and disruption. The single largest item of the month was spent getting my head around the state of cross compilation. Mostly this was figuring out the history and state of various cross compilation approaches in the core codebase, to help Jess Robinson refine a potential TPF grant application for cross compilation At the time

Nicholas Clark writes: Sorry for the delay in this report I've been ill, been away, been ill while away, and generally disrupted, and I wasn't the only one ill in the house. Fortunately everyone is well again, and the backlog of other tasks is considerably reduced. Zombie undead global backref destruction panics strike again. I don't know what it is with these critters, but another variant turned up, in almost

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the March period. Spent the month successfully bringing run-time regex code blocks into the new way of doing things. My previous work on this had handled the cases where the code appears within a literal regex, e.g. bq. /ab $r qr/xy /z$r/; In all the above cases, the code block is parsed and compiled by the

We have received the following grant application from Paul Johnson. 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: Paul Johnson Project Title: Improving Devel::Cover Synopsis: In the past few months Booking.com has donated €100,000 to The Perl Foundation to aid the further development

I am pleased to announce that Nicholas Clark's "request":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/02/grant-extension-request---impr.html to extend his "Improving Perl 5 grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/08/grant-proposal-improving-perl.html has been successful. This extension would not have been possible without the generous contributions that have been made to the "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund. I would like to thank everyone who has supported this fund and in particular "Booking.com":http://www.booking.com/, "cPanel":http://www.cpanel.net/, "craigslist":http://www.craigslist.org/, "Dijkmat":http://www.dijkmat.nl/, "Liquid Web":http://www.liquidweb.com/, "Net-A-Porter":http://www.net-a-porter.com/, the "Oslo Perl Mongers":http://oslo.pm.org/, "perl-services.de":http://www.perl-services.de/, and the "Vienna

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the February period. I spent a couple of days rebasing my davem/re_eval branch to incorporate recent changes to blead, but apart from that didn't do anything, due to a mixture of illness, being stuck, and doing other things. The good news is that the illness and stuck-ness are both ended, so I have started work on the

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. The grant, that is currently running, is on track to finish successfully at the end of March. This extension would allow Nicholas to devote another 400 hours to the project. Details of the work completed so far can be read in the following blog posts: "Month 1":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/10/improving-perl-5-report-for-mo.html "Month 2":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/11/improving-perl-5-report-for-mo-1.html "Month 3":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/12/improving-perl-5-grant-report.html "Month 4":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/01/improving-perl-5-grant-report-1.html "Month 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/02/improving-perl-5-grant-report-2.html Before

I am pleased to announce that Ricardo Signes's grant application for "travel to the QA Hackathon":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/01/perl-5-grant-application-trave.html has been accepted. 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. If you would like to contribute directly to the "2012 Perl QA Hackathon":http://2012.qa-hackathon.org/qa2012/ they are accepting "donations":http://2012.qa-hackathon.org/qa2012/donate.html.

Nicholas Clark writes: I finally got time to address the weak reference global destruction "panic" described in November's report. Now understanding the problem, the interim fix seemed clean and fast to implement. Of course no plan survives contact with the enemy. In this case, fixing the first panic revealed a second panic at a different point in the code. In turn, that took a lot of time to nail down

We have received the following Perl 5 grant application from Ricardo Signes. Before the Board votes on this proposal we would like to have a period of community consultation. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org. Name Ricardo Signes Project Title Perl QA Hackathon 2012 Amount Requested: $900 Synopsis This grant will be used to pay for travel

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the December period. Spent it continuing my overhaul of the re_eval mechanism. This month I finished off fixing literal code blocks within patterns; that is to say, in all places where a code block appears literally within a quoted-regex context in perl source, that code block will only be compiled once, at the same time as the

Nicholas Clark writes: The start of December was mostly spent unpicking and simplifying how embed.h is included in perl.h. embed.h is one of the core's generated headers, containing C pre-processor directives to simplify use of the C API functions, by wrapping them such that the programmer doesn't need to deal with the implementation details of ithreads. Over the years, embed.h has come to be included by perl.h in 4 different

chromatic writes: Last year Perl.com came back to life, this time under the guidance of The Perl Foundation. We're glad to be back, publishing tips, tricks, and tutorials for novices, dabblers, and professionals alike! We've already published some great articles, but we need your help. What cool things are you doing with Perl in your work? What clever hacks have you perpetuated as you play? Which module did you just

Nicholas Clark writes: A fair chunk of November was spent on disentangling pod/buildtoc Originally pod/buildtoc was a script run by the pumpking to rebuild pod/buildtoc.pod, and pod/buildtoc.pod was shipped in the distribution. In 2003 I extended it to add code to regenerate the lists of Pod files in various Makefiles, which were repetitive to maintain manually, and contained several errors where particular files were omitted. The assumption was that pod/buildtoc

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the November period. Spent it continuing my overhaul of the re_eval mechanism. This month I made literal code blocks work properly within runtime patterns, i.e. /$runtime I also made it so that qr//'s embedded within other patterns are no longer simply stringified and interpolated into the new pattern; instead, any code blocks within the qr are

I am happy to announce that Dr. Nicholas Clark's request for an extension of his "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Grant":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund, "Improving Perl 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/08/grant-proposal-improving-perl.html, has been accepted. This extension will allow Nicholas to spend another 400 hours working on the Perl 5 core. Since the "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund was created in June we have raised a total of $58,856. I would like to thank everyone who has supported this

We have received the following "Hague Grant":http://www.perlfoundation.org/ian_hague_perl_6_development_grants application from Jonathan "Duke" Leto. 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. Name Jonathan "Duke" Leto Project Title PL/Perl6 Infrastructure and Improvements Synopsis The proposed grant would support the development of PL/Perl6,

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. The grant, that is currently running, is on track to finish successfully at the end of November. Before we make a decision on this extension we would like to have a period of community consultation, which will last for seven days. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments

I am pleased to announce that Carl Mäsak's Hague Grant application, "Implementation of macros in Rakudo":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/09/hague-grant-application-implem.html, has been accepted. I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on this 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.

Nicholas Clark writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the October period. automating git bisect: I continued the work I started at the end of September to automate the use of git bisect. My hope is that it's now easy enough for anyone who finds a core perl behaviour change that affects them to use it to find the commit that caused it and the associated

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the October period. Spent it mainly working on fixing literal code within runtime and qr//, e.g. /$runtime Over the last month I have averaged 15.4 hours per week. As of 2011/10/31: since the beginning of the grant: 86.4 weeks 957.8 total hours 11.1 average hours per week Since the recent extending of the