Tony Cook recently requested an extension of his Maintaining Perl 5 grant. This request was successful and Tony was awarded another $20,000. I would like to thank the community members who took time to comment on this grant extension request and our sponsors who made funding the grant possible through our Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund.

Paweł Murias continues to work on his "JavaScript backend for Rakudo":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2016/02/ian-hague-perl-6-grant-applica.html grant. Paweł Murias writes: Current State rakudo.js compiles 70% of the core setting. I'm working on getting it to compile the whole setting. The setting executes a bunch of code at compile time so the code the compiler is generated is validated to some degree I'm mostly fixing bugs, and implementing missing features in the backend While doing that

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent last month: eliminating the OP_PUSHRE op, converting OP_SPLIT from being a LISTOP to a PMOP, and making split faster see v5.25.5-71-gdbdb57e; working on various fuzzer tickets; trying to work out when one should use pad_free pad_swipe S_op_clear_gv or just plain SvREFCNT_dec I gave up on this for now; picking some quick and low-hanging fruit off my TODO list; Summary bq. 3:52 sassign is wrongly declared

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 42 tickets were reviewed, and 6 patches were applied. Hours Activity 0.93 %zu on HP-UX issue 3.22 #123981 updates, testing, comment 5.19 #126482 debugging #126482 bisect, review changes #126482 more debugging, comment 12.51 #127663 more tests, code review #127663 re-work, testing #127663 delete on abort, testing #127663 remove some later work, testing #127663 polish, testing #127663 review, push to smoke-me #127663 code review, testing, setup for

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent last month mainly working on "fuzzer" bug reports. Nothing really stands out as deserving special mention. Summary bq. 1:23 "Confused by eval behavior" thread 0:14 "perl #128940":https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=128940 "Use of uninitialized value $fh" mentions wrong variable 2:48 "perl #128951":https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=128951 heap-buffer-overflow in Perl_sv_vcatpvfn_flags 0:51 "perl #128952":https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=128952 stack-buffer-overflow in S_missingterm 1:41 "perl #128989":https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=128989 Bleadperl v5.25.3-266-g1d7e644 breaks VPIT/Variable-Magic-0.59.tar.gz 4:46 perl #129012 heap-buffer-overflow Perl_fbm_instr 2:04 "perl #129029":https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=129029 SIGBUS Perl_sv_peek 0:24

I am pleased to announce that "The Perl Foundation":http://www.perlfoundation.org/ will be taking part in "Outreachy":https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/ again this year. We are offering one full-time internship in the winter program, which will run from December 6th to April 6th. The application process is "now open":https://outreachy.gnome.org/?q=program_home&prg=7 and applications need to be submitted by October 17th. Our mentor, Dylan Hardison, from the Bugzilla project has provided a list of ideas and possible projects "on

Jonathan Worthington's recent "grant extension application":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2016/09/perl-6-performance-and-reliabi-2.html, through the "Perl 6 Core Development Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_6_core_development_fund, has been successful. This extension will allow Jonathan to dedicate another 200 hours to the grant. I would like to thank the community members who took time to comment on this grant extension request and our sponsors who made funding the grant possible.

Tony Cook has requested an extension of $20,000 for his "Maintaining Perl 5 Grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/05/grant-application-maintaining.html. This grant has been running successfully since July 2013. If this extension is granted it 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. As well as posting reports on the p5p mailing list Tony provides detailed monthly reports, the

Jonathan has "successfully completed":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2016/08/perl-6-performance-and-reliabi-1.html his "Perl 6 Performance and Reliability Engineering":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2016/02/grant-proposal-perl-6-performa.html grant. He has requested an extension of $10,000 so that he can spend another 200 hours on this grant. This funding will come from the "Perl 6 Core Development Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_6_core_development_fund. Before we make a decision on this extension we would like to have a period of community consultation that will last for seven days. Please leave feedback in the

Jonathan Worthington writes: I have completed the initial 200 hours awarded under my "Perl 6 performance and reliability engineering grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2016/02/grant-proposal-perl-6-performa.html. This report summarizes what has been achieved in this time. I have also written a number of more detailed "blog posts":https://6guts.wordpress.com/ about my work. Tooling I implemented heap snapshots in MoarVM. This is a mechanism for taking recordings of what is in the heap after each garbage collection run. It

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 27 tickets were reviewed, and 5 patches were applied Hours Activity 5.02 #126203 review code for leak issue, apply original patch, find related issues, research #126203 more related issues #126203 email to jhi 0.95 #127663 re-familiarize, consider options 21.05 #127834 comments, fix some issues #127834 customized updates, testing, comment with new patchsets #127834 update patch sets, proposed perldelta #127834 review updates, research, comment #127834 fix some

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent last month mainly working on "fuzzer" bug reports, and trying to process some of the backlog in my p5p mailbox. Summary bq. 1:45 "Confused by eval behavior" thread 1:21 @INC issues 1:26 Deprecate /$empty_string/ 2:03 Assert fail in S_find_uninit_var 1:19 Assert fail in S_sublex_done 0:26 Segfault in Perl_gv_setref 0:14 Segfault due to stack overflow 3:16 fix build warnings and smoke failures 8:46 process p5p mailbox

I am pleased to report that Dave Mitchell's recent request to extend his "Maintaining the Perl 5 Core":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/09/grant-application-maintaining-1.html grant has been successful. The award of $20,000 will allow him to spend another 400 hours on this project. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on this application 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. If you are interested in funding this

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 23 tickets were reviewed, and 5 patches were applied Hours Activity 0.86 #127333 review, try to apply #127333 testing and apply to blead 5.55 #127380 comment #127380 testing aginst blead, pod fixes #127380 finalize pod fixes, testing and testing of backports, push to blead, maint-5.24 and maint-5.22, perldelta #127380 comment 9.68 #127663 testing, also #126710 #127663 debugging, GNUmakefile build issues #127663 debugging, re-work #127663 testing, fixes

Dave Mitchell writes: I didn't really do much that stands this month; I just reduced the backlog in my p5p mailbox a bit, and worked on several miscellaneous tickets. The most noteworthy bugfix related to getting overwritten while exiting an eval scope. Earlier work by Zefram had ensured that is assigned to in a late stage of scope unwinding, but it turns out that in void context or after a

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 33 tickets were reviewed, and 4 patches were applied Hours Activity 1.35 #126228 research, adapt to a new patch, testing and comment 1.47 #126686 review, testing and comment 0.98 #127234 testing and apply to blead 1.80 #127380 adjust one proposed patch, testing, comment #127380 comment, trying to push things along 37.34 #127663 work on path handling, temp file creation, handling #127663 re-work path storage #127663 new

Dave Mitchell has requested an extension of $20,000 for his Maintaining the Perl 5 Core grant. 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 Month 30":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2016/04/maintaining-the-perl-5-core-re-26.html "Report for Month 31":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2016/05/maintaining-the-perl-5-core-re-27.html

Tony has supplied the second report for his "Maintaining Perl 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/05/grant-application-maintaining.html grant, which was recently successfully "extended":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2016/02/maintaining-perl-5---grant-ext-1.html. Tony Cook writes: Approximately 40 tickets were reviewed, and 3 patches were applied. Hours Activity 1.66 #121734 report cygwin issue upstream #121734 test upstream fix and comment #121734 comment on POSIX::strxfrm bug note 0.27 #122551 review discussion, TR::Perl bugs 2.23 #126188 debugging, try potential fixes, comment 0.92 #126203 reproduce, comment and supply

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent last month mainly getting Scope::Upper working on 5.24.0. It broke heavily after the context stack reworking that came with 5.23.8, due to its heavy reliance on the internal details of perl's context stack and scope exit behaviours. I don't intend in general spending so much time again on fixing up such CPAN modules; it's just that once I had started, I wanted to see it

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 48 tickets were reviewed, and 7 patches were applied |Hours Activity 1.57 investigate new ipsysv.t failures on darwin, create cpan #112827, fix in blead, #p5p unicode string behaviour discussion 4.60 #122287 testing #122287 work on a patch to Configure/Makefile.SH #122287 more work, testing cross platform, comment with patch #122287 double check patch, expand comment on patch 1.47 #124430 try to find why App::assh started working #124430

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent last month mainly working on various assorted RT tickets. Summary bq. 10:54 charset.t and subst.t fail on Solaris under -Duse64bitall 0:40 Bleadperl breaks TOKUHIROM/Module-Build-Pluggable-0.10.tar.gz on Windows 18:02 @INC issues 14:57 Blead breaks Scope::Upper 0:51 $=x~0 segfaults Perl 5.24.0-RC1-2-gde1d2c7 1:00 Slowdown in split list assign 9:50 process p5p mailbox 1:00 review Provide -Dfortify_inc 0:29 review and apply Get -DPERL_MEM_LOG working again 1:00 sort out a unconfig.h

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent last month mainly: continuing to look into some of the CPAN breakage associated with my recent context work that's been merged into blead; continuing to look at smoke and 5.24 blocker issues Summary bq. 0:25 Perl_sv_clear: Assertion 1:11 Flawed environmental variable handling 5:24 regex qr/ fails to compile on x64 debugging optimized builds 15:53 dtrace/-DDEBUGGING builds now fail on Solaris 1:27 Bleadperl v5.23.7-133-g7b0c33a breaks WBRASWELL/RPerl-1.600000.tar.gz

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 57 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 14 patches were applied. and are related in that both problems are related to the same set of changes. Between perl 5.8 and 5.16 inclusive, perl cached the CV for DESTROY in overload magic for the stash. This was four times faster than the simple method lookup previously done each time an object needed to be destroyed.

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent last month mainly: looking into some of the CPAN breakage associated with my recent context work that's been merged into blead; looking at a build failure with solaris, dtrace, shared library and static inline functions Summary bq. 1:00 Bleadperl breaks Algorithm-Permute 16:01 dtrace/-DDEBUGGING builds now fail on Solaris 6:07 fix build warnings and smoke failures 3:22 fixup CPAN distributions affected by context changes 6:11 fixup

Tony Cook has requested an extension of $20,000 for his Maintaining Perl 5 grant. This grant has been running successfully since July 2013. If this extension is grounded it 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. As well as posting reports on the p5p mailing list Tony provides detailed monthly reports, the

Jonathan Worthington's "recent grant application":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2016/02/grant-proposal-perl-6-performa.html, through the "Perl 6 Core Development Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_6_core_development_fund, has been successful. This grant will allow Jonathan to dedicate 200 hours to improve both runtime and compiler performance of Rakudo Perl 6. I would like to thank all the community members who took time to comment on this grant request and our sponsors who made funding the grant possible.

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 43 tickets were reviewed, and 11 patches were applied Hours Activity 2.38 #123737 testing, apply to blead #123737 testing, produce a patch and comment #123737 re-test, look for similar no_op issues, push to blead 2.15 #123788 re-check patch, testing #123788 more testing, apply to blead 4.37 #124387 work on autoload on top of above #124387 testing, code archaeology, produce patches and comment #124387 review test results,

Dave Mitchell writes: I didn't do much this month because I was mostly on vacation. Fixed a couple of bugs. I did merge in my context revamping work, but that's being separately funded by Booking.com. Summary: bq. 2:00 Assert fail/segfault in Perl_sv_pvn_force_flags 2:19 enhance Porting/bench.pl's display formats 3:57 process p5p mailbox 1:00 remove vestigial use of PRIVSHIFT **9:16 Total As of 2015/12/31: since the beginning of the grant: bq. 120.0

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 28 tickets were reviewed, and 5 patches were applied. Hours Activity 0.33 #123981 review and comment 0.38 #123991 re-test and apply to blead |4.24 #124097 research #124097 research, testing #124097 more research and testing, comment with new patch 1.62 #124840 work on reverting 8c34e50dc, deal with conflicts #124840 more conflicts, testing 2.08 #125540 testing, debugging, trying to understand base cause 0.43 #125789/#121048/#125341 test the open tickets

Dave Mitchell writes: This report notionally covers 2 months, but almost all of November has no hours because it was during a gap before my grant was extended. I spent most of my time fixing assorted RT tickets and smoke issues. Summary bq. 2:36 Illegal division by zero leads to Assertion 2:33 Unknown regexp modifier/unmatched 1:21 Bleadperl v5.23.1-199-ga5f4850 breaks BRUMLEVE/ddb-1.3.1.tar.gz 1:00 Out-of-bounds Reads 3:10 Perl_rpeep: Assertion `oldoldop->op_next oldop 8:48 fix

Jonathan Worthington has submitted the following grant proposal under the Perl 6 Core Development Fund. 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: Jonathan Worthington Project Title: Perl 6 Performance and Reliability Engineering Synopsis: Improve both runtime and compiler performance of Rakudo Perl

I am pleased to announce that Ricardo Signes' recent grant application to cover the cost of his travel to the QA Hackathon has been successful. I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on this grant. This grant was awarded from our Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund. If you would like to contribute to this fund please use our donation system or contact karen perlfoundation.org The QA Hackathon is

Jonathan Worthington writes: I applied for a third and final extension of my Perl 6 Release Goals grant, which was published for comments in December and subsequently approved. The final extension granted a further 110 hours of work, which I completed prior to the Christmas release of Perl 6. This report covers the work that was done under this extension, and concludes with some final comments on the grant as

We have received the following 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 2016 Amount Requested: $1200 Synopsis: This grant will be used to pay

We have received the following Perl 6 Ian Hague Grant Application. 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: Paweł Murias Project Title: JavaScript backend for Rakudo Synopsis: Improve the JavaScript backend from handling NQP to full Perl 6.

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 54 tickets were reviewed, and 12 patches were applied. illustrates how some of perl's internal tools need to be careful of which parts of the language they use. The tr/// operator can do its job in one of two ways, if all the code points are between 0 and 255 with a 256 entry table of shorts, otherwise using a swash, which is created by

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 46 tickets were reviewed, and 13 patches were applied. Hours Activity 1.98 #123658 review, testing, apply to blead 0.42 #123985, #123831 review, research, ask kid51 for a test build 2.93 #123994 review code, testing #123994 more testing, comment with some possible fixes 0.63 #124063 apply to blead with some fiddling 2.29 #124068 review, research #124068 more research, comment 0.85 #124080 review, testing, comment 0.35 #125569 research,

Jonathan has successfully completed his first grant extension of his "Perl 6 Release Goals":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2015/04/grant-proposal-perl-6-release.html grant. He has provided the following report and is asking for another extension to continue with this work. Before we make a decision on this extension we would like to have a period of community consultation that will last for seven days. Please leave feedback in the comments or, if you prefer, email your comments to

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 42 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 7 patches were applied. Hours Activity 1.20 #120903 review, testing, apply to blead #120903 fix typo, half-write a perldelta entry and decide not to 0.97 #122368 review new patch, comment 0.65 #123831 review discussion, research and comment 2.52 #123867 review newest patches, testing #123867 review test results, apply to blead 2.98 #123981 travis modifications and testing #123981 review

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent October mainly working on two things. First, I optimised some common arithmetic operators: so that for the very common case of both args being simple ints in ranges that won't overflow, or both being floats, a simple C-level or whatever can be directly done. For more complex or mixed args, it falls back to the existing slower code. For and I optimised the simple integer

Dave Mitchell has requested an extension of $20,000 for his "Maintaining the Perl 5 Core":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/09/grant-application-maintaining-1.html grant. 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 Month 22":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2015/09/maintaining-the-perl-5-core-re-19.html "Report for Month 23":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2015/09/maintaining-the-perl-5-core-re-20.html

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent September mainly working on two things. First, I made the stack grow macros EXTEND and MEXTEND more robust against count truncating and wrapping, especially on platforms where the sizes of ints and pointers differ. The initial impetus to do this was a bug reported against the repeat operator in list mode on a platform with 32-bit pointers but 64-bit ints; but new compiler warnings generated

Jonathan Worthington has requested an extension of $10,000 for his "Perl 6 Release Goals":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2015/04/grant-proposal-perl-6-release.html grant. The funds for this extension would come from the "Perl 6 Core Development Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_6_core_development_fund. The requested extension would allow Jonathan to devote another 250 hours to the project. Jonathan has provided a "detailed report":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2015/09/perl-6-release-goals-initial-g.html for the work done so far, which also provides details of the work he plans to carry out if the extension

Jonathan Worthington writes: In April 2015 I started working on a "grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2015/04/grant-proposal-perl-6-release.html from The Perl Foundation's "Perl 6 Core Development Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_6_core_development_fund. The grant was provided to enable me to dedicate much more time to the Perl 6 project than would otherwise have been possible, and it has indeed enabled this. My work has been, and continues to be, focused on enabling the release of the Perl 6 language along with

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. As well as posting reports on the p5p mailing list Tony provides detailed monthly reports, the most recent of

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 57 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 12 patches were applied. Hours Activity 0.83 #120826 re-work documentation patch #120826 re-test, apply to blead, close 4.99 #120903 first pass over documentation update #120903 more documentation, testing, comment with patch #120903 local edits, comment 0.53 #121200 check it's the same issue, merge tickets, comment 0.08 #123543 review and resolve 0.67 #123658 comment 0.17 #123867 comment 0.42 #123879

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent August mainly working on two things. First, I continued working on re-jigging how scope entry and exit works I had already heavily reworked how subs are called, making a bare sub call: bc. sub f f use about 1/3 less instructions, branches etc. I've now made the more general loop and pp_enter context stuff use the new regime too

I am pleased to announce that the "recent grant application":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2015/08/perl-6-hague-grant-application-1.html from the Swiss Perl Workshop team has been successful. I would like to thank everyone who took the time to comment on this grant application. If you would like to help fund Perl 6 development please consider "donating":https://secure.donor.com/pf012/give to our new "Perl 6 Core Development Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_6_core_development_fund.

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent July mainly working on two things. First, I continued to work on the whole issue of how subroutines are invoked and returned from, and especially how the various perl stacks are manipulated during this time, i.e. all the PUSHBLOCK/PUSHSUB stuff. I also started extending the work to other context types, such as loops. I have mainly concentrated on removing unnecessary fields from the CXt_SUB context

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 61 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 10 patches were applied. Hours Activity 0.82 #116054 review, close 120208, comment 2.98 #118127 review and briefly comment #118127 irc discussion, research, comment 1.03 #119515 review discussion, testing, apply to blead 1.38 #120826 review, review code, write up some documentation #120826 review, research, comment with patch 0.60 #122096 review and comment 0.13 #122629 review new discussion 0.50 #123599

We have received the following Hague Grant application from the organisers of the Swiss Perl Workshop. Before we vote on this proposal we would like to have a period of community consultation for 7 days. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org. Name: Matthias Bloch, Roman Baumer, Dirk Deimeke Project Title: Perl 6 Hackathon at the Swiss Perl

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 65 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 14 patches were applied. Hours Activity 0.45 #122281 review, testing, apply to blead 0.48 #122405 review discussion and comment 1.22 #122872 review discussion, review latest patch and comment 0.27 #123264 retest and apply to blead 1.17 #123398 review discussion and code, testing, push to blead, comment 1.58 #123440 review and update, apply to blead and comment 1.18 #123658

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent June mainly continuing to work on the whole issue of how subroutines are invoked and returned from, and especially how the various perl stacks are manipulated during this time. I also fixed some more Coverity and smoke issues. Summary bq. 55:39 #124156: death during unwinding causes crash 1:11 make /\C/ an error 15:45 process p5p mailbox 10:01 silence compiler warnings **82:36 Total bq. 4.3 weeks

I'm delighted to announce that Dave Mitchell's recent "grant extension request":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2015/06/grant-extension-request.html has been successful. This extension will allow Dave to continue with this work for another 400 hours. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on this application 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. If you are interested in funding this work please contact karen perlfoundation.org or donate directly through

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 37 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 2 patches were applied. bulk88's patch in adds support for building perl in parallel on Win32 using dmake's -P option. I've spent some time trying to improve it, but ended up running into limitations in dmake, in particular it seems to call child makefiles with -S preventing any parallel builds in the child. If a GNU make makefile

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent the month doing two main things: fixing 5.22 blockers, and once there were no blockers left, I began work on looking at the whole issue of how subroutines are invoked and returned from, and especially how the various perl stacks are manipulated during this time. It turns out that 6 stacks are involved, and there is lots of duplicated code, difficulties with stacks being doubly

Dave Mitchell has requested an extension of $20,000 for his "Maintaining the Perl 5 Core":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/09/grant-application-maintaining-1.html grant. 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 Month 19":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2015/05/maintaining-the-perl-5-core-re-16.html "Report for Month 17

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 40 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 4 patches were applied. This month blead allowed patches only for blockers, so there won't many patches applied to blead. I spent much of my time working on blockers, both trying to solve them in blead, or to report issues to CPAN maintainers whose modules were broken. Hours Activity 0.20 #122136 review cpan tickets and update 2.92 #122159

I am pleased to announce that Bart Wiegmans' recent Hague Grant Application, "Advancing the MoarVM JIT":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2015/04/perl-6-hague-grant-application.html has been successful. I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on this proposal.

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent the month mainly fixing issues that were 5.22 blockers. Summary bq. 2:18 Apparent failure to localize %^H 2:13 Bleadperl v5.21.6-89-gd648ffc breaks autobox 4:33 S_no_op: Assertion `s oldbp' failed 1:25 Perl_pp_substcont: Assertion failed 1:21 Unable to build 64-bit blead using gcc-4.8.2 1:21 Perl_ck_stringify: Assertion ->op_sibling> 10:57 Perl_sv_clear: Assertion 0:37 Perl_sv_2pv_flags: Assertion 2:09 null ptr deref Perl_cv_forget_slab 0:20 fix t/uni.parser.t under EBCDIC 10:02 more op_siblings stuff 7:27

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 25 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 2 patches were applied. This was a short month since my old grant ran out, and a new grant started. was interesting to me because is illustrated how perl tracks which globs a given @ISA is present in and how that was broken in this case. Each @ISA has isa magic. If the @ISA is only present

I am happy to announce that Jonathan Worthington's grant proposal, "Perl 6 Release Goals":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2015/04/grant-proposal-perl-6-release.html, has been accepted. This is the first grant awarded under the new "Perl 6 Core Development Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_6_core_development_fund. Thanks goes to the community members who took time to provide feedback on this proposal. I would also like to thank Patrick Michaud and Liz Mattijsen who have agreed to help with the management of this grant.

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent the month mainly fixing issues reported by the Coverity static code analyser, and fixing assorted bugs that were in the main 5.22 blockers. Some notable highlights: Coverity reported an issue related to MEM_WRAP_CHECK although it turned out to be harmless, looking at it gave me an idea to make the wrap check be constant-folded at compile time more often, and since this macro Copy etc>

We have received the following Hague Grant application from Bart Wiegmans. 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: Bart Wiegmans Project Title: Advancing the MoarVM JIT Synopsis: Implement an advanced code generation algorithm for the MoarVM JIT compiler,

Jonathan Worthington has submitted a grant proposal under our new "Perl 6 Core Development Fund.":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_6_core_development_fund 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: Jonathan Worthington Project Title: Work towards the 2015 Perl 6 release goals Synopsis: Fund a leading Rakudo Perl 6 and

I am pleased to announce the launch of a new fundraising drive to raise money for Perl 6 development. Its immediate focus is the target of releasing a Perl 6 language specification along with a conforming implementation in 2015; beyond this, funds will be used to support maintenance and improvement of Perl 6 implementation. The initial goal is to raise $25,000 to fund the work of Jonathan Worthington. Jonathan is

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 55 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 10 patches were applied. shows perl's dependency on other system tools, in this case there were two issues when using GCC 5.0. First, with GCC 5.0, by default the pre-processor with generate #line entries showing the origin of the definition of a macro that's been replaced, so the pre-processor was producing output from: bc. "EDOM" something like:

I am pleased to announced that The Perl Foundation will be taking part in "Outreachy":https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/, the successor of the Outreach Program for Women. The Outreach Program for Women was started by the GNOME Foundation in 2006 to encourage women to participate in the GNOME project. Since inception the project has grown to include many Free and Open Source organisations, including The Perl Foundation, and now the program has been rebranded

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. As well as posting reports on the p5p mailing list Tony provides detailed monthly reports, the most recent of

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 61 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 11 patches were applied. There were no especially interesting tickets this month. Hours Activity 1.60 cpan #101078 create/test bisect script and start bisect cpan #101078 review bisect results, comment 0.27 #120357 research and comment 0.52 #122432 review status #122432 summarize status of cpan dists 2.25 #122443 testing, polish 1.48 #122730 bang head against dzil, try some simple fixes,

I am pleased to announce that Ricardo Signes' recent grant application to cover the costs of his travel to the "QA Hackathon":http://act.qa-hackathon.org/qa2015/ has been successful. I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on this grant. The grant was 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 or contact karen perlfoundation.org The "QA Hackathon":http://act.qa-hackathon.org/qa2015/ is

Dave Mitchell writes: At the start of the month I continued work on making the stderr of builds less noisy, and for blead to build, test, and be stderr-clean under ASan -fsanitize=undefined. At the end of this work I raised around 26 RT and github tickets with fixes for cpan/ distributions; currently around 9 of these have been merged back into blead and a further 4 have been merged upstream

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 2015 Amount Requested: $1200 Synopsis This grant will be used

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 36 tickets were reviewed, and 5 patches were applied. I spent some time this month working on getting minitest working on Win32. In 2004 the Win32 makefiles were changed to use harness instead of TEST for minitest, presumably at some time after that Test::Harness was changed to load IO unconditionally, breaking minitest on Win32. So I switched minitest back to using TEST and then worked through

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 38 tickets were reviewed, and 10 patches were applied. is interesting in the number of things that were wrong with the first test in t/op/utf8cache.t. This was reported by Daniel Dragan where op/utfcache.t was producing a an error message, but was still passing: bc. 1..15 is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. ok 1 ok

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent most of my time last month making the stderr of the perl build and test process less noisy, and for blead to build, test, and be stderr-clean under ASan -fsanitize=undefined. Quite a few of the fixes are on cpan/ code, so I haven't pushed those to blead, but rather to the branches davem/cpan-warn and davem/cpan-undef. and I've opened tickets sent notifications to the relevant CPAN

Paul Johnson has successfully completed his "Improving Devel::Cover grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/04/grant-application-improving-de.html. I would like to thank Paul and his grant managers for all their work. I would also like to thank those who support the "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund without your contributions we would not have been able to fund this project. Paul Johnson writes: In accordance with the terms of my grant from TPF this is the final report for

The winter round of the "Outreach Program for Women":https://wiki.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen/2014/DecemberMarch has begun and will run from the 9th December 2014 to the 9th March 2015. There are forty-four participants in this round and three of them will be working on Perl. When "we announced":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2014/09/outreach-program-for-women---w.html that we would be taking part in the program again we had funding for one intern. There is additional funding available for good candidates and thanks to

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent nearly all my time last month developing a new tool for benchmarking perl itself, Porting/bench.pl. See "http://nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/222802":http://nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/222802 for the announcement. Summary bq. 2:00 /\G^/ seems abnormally slow 0:40 Memory leak in regex appears in 5.20.1> 0:43 Slow global pattern match in taint mode with input from utf8 41:22 create Porting/bench.pl 11:20 process p5p mailbox **56:05 TotaL As of 2014/11/30: since the beginning of the grant:

Tony Cook writes: This is the first monthly report for my fourth grant. Approximately 58 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 11 patches were applied. is a bug that expresses itself as writing unexpected text after the text you expect to write, when writing to the Win32 console. This is caused by a bug in the Win32 WriteFile API, which returns the number of character written, rather than

I am pleased to announce that Dave Mitchell's "recent request":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2014/10/grant-extension-request-dave-m.html for an extension of his "Maintaining the Perl 5 Core":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/09/grant-application-maintaining-1.html grant has been successful. This extension will allow Dave to continue with this work for another 400 hours. Many thanks to everyone who provided feedback on this application 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.

Dave Mitchell writes: The main things I worked on this month were: set up the beginnings of a basic performance/optimisation testing infrastructure under t/perf/ investigated the performance of perl's string allocation and growing implementation, and came up with some suggested improvements

Dave Mitchell writes: The main things I worked on this month were: finished off making the op_private OP flags and data be auto-generated from a single consistent source. I started to investigate how the allocation and growing of strings interacts with COW and the underlying malloc library implementation reviewing, discussing, fixing up and applying Syber's method call optimisation work bq. 3:52 Bleadperl v5.21.1-120-g34dadc6 breaks SYOHEX/Text-Xslate-3.3.3.tar.gz 1:14 Memory leak oddities with

Dave Mitchell has requested an extension of $20,000 for his "Maintaining the Perl 5 Core grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/09/grant-application-maintaining-1.html. 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 Month 11":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2014/10/maintaining-the-perl-5-core-re-9.html "Report for Month 10":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2014/08/maintaining-the-perl-5-core-re-8.html

I am pleased to announce that Tony Cook's "Maintaining Perl 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2014/03/grant-extension-request-from-t.html grant has been extended by another 400 hours. I would like to thank 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: The main things I worked on this month were: making the op_private OP flags and data be auto-generated from a single consistent source. Its actually complete now, although wasn't at the end of last month, which is the period this report covers. some more work on my OP_MULTIDEREF optimisation. The basic optimisation works, but it still needs work on being handled by B::* and by the use

I am delighted to announce that the Perl Foundation will once again be taking part in the "GNOME Outreach Program for Women":http://gnome.org/opw/. The Outreach Program for Women was started by the GNOME Foundation in 2006 to encourage women to participate in the GNOME project. In the first round eight interns took part working from GNOME. This program has been expanded and in the last round, that took place this summer,

Pattawan Kaewduangdee writes: First of all, I would like to say thank you to "The Perl Foundation":http://www.perlfoundation.org/ for giving me such a great opportunity to work on "MetaCPAN":https://metacpan.org/ as an intern in the "GNOME Outreach Program for Women":http://gnome.org/opw/. MetaCPAN is a really friendly part of the Perl community where I have learnt a lot from smart and specialized Perl developers. While I was participating in the program I improved the

Tony Cook has requested an extension of $20,000 for his "Maintaining Perl 5 grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/05/grant-application-maintaining.html. 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. As well as posting reports on the p5p mailing list Tony provides detailed monthly reports, the most recent of

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 22 tickets were reviewed or otherwise worked on, and 3 patches were applied. With this month I've exceeded the hours in my grant. Hours Activity 8.36 #121159 code, tests #121159 debugging, coding #121159 refactor, testing 0.50 #121404 fix, retest, apply to blead and comment 1.12 #122005 review is_common ptr_table_* code, produce a crash, comment 0.10 #122024 review and close 0.57 #122107 re-test, apply to blead, comment

Randy Stauner writes: Thanks to the sponsorship of the Perl Foundation, this summer I had the pleasure of mentoring "Pattawan Kaewduangdee":http://oiami.blogspot.jp/ from Thailand as a "MetaCPAN":https://metacpan.org/ contributor through the "GNOME Foundation's Free and Open Source Program for Women":http://gnome.org/opw/. Pattawan was a great help to MetaCPAN and the Perl community. She's bright and ambitious and accomplished a lot during her internship. Her schedule adapted over the summer and she kept up

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent July mainly processing my p5p mailbox, and looking at various bugs, especially ones which appear that they may be 5.20.0 regressions. Summary bq. 2:45 "Malformed UTF-8 character 1:41 Bad STORE call for tied hash 0:13 Possible regexp memory explosion in 5.20.0 1:28 OOK hack example in perlguts is outdated with COW 0:25 Pathological performance of a pattern match 0:30 cpan/Time-HiRes/t/itimer.t persistently fails with clang 2:24

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 67 tickets were reviewed or otherwise worked on, and 11 patches were applied. I spent some more time on this month, finding a bug in pthreads on NetBSD. Thread specific storage should be initialized to NULL, but under some circumstances this doesn't happen on NetBSD, including NetBSD 6.1.3. This is apparently fixed in NetBSD current. I produced a candidate patch for this ticket, LeonT asked me

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 63 tickets were reviewed or worked on, and 10 patches were applied. Probably the most interesting task this month was attempting to optimize regen/regcharclass.pl which became noticably slower when extra EBCDIC code pages were added to the build. Two fairly simple optimizations fell out of the profile from Devel::NYTProf. get_a2n and get_I8_2_utf were each called over 150,000 times, and returned their mappings as a list, while

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 May and June 2014. Actually, it's really only for May. I did some work on Devel::Cover in June, but I am not charging that to the grant, so the month referred to here is May. This month I released versions 1.14 and 1.15. Perls 5.20.0

Dave Mitchell writes: I spent June mainly processing my p5p mailbox, and looking at various bugs, half of which appeared to be 5.20 regressions. Summary bq. 6:40 COWification seems expensive in PADMY variables 0:28 newSVpvf slow in perl 5.20.0 0:28 Benchmark.pm uses excessive CPU on OpenBSD 0:07 PL_sv_no weirdness 1:16 Bleadperl v5.21.0-274-ga7ab896 breaks SHURIKO/String-Simrank-0.079.tar.gz 1:39 Perl regression bug since 5.13.11 bq. 4.3 weeks 36.6 total hours 8.5 average hours per

Dave Mitchell writes: I mainly spent May helping to get blead ready for release; in particular by trying to reduce smoke failures and by looking at 5.20 blocker tickets. Summary bq. 0:24 #95493 for Devel-Size: broken by bleadperl 1:00 #95940 for Cache-Mmap: Test suite segfaults with Perl 5.20.0-RC1 2:04 document/publicize THINKFIRST 1:15 Bleadperl v5.19.3-16-gce0d59f breaks the CPAN 2:10 Bleadperl v5.19.6-171-g437e3a7 breaks ROBIN/Want-0.21.tar.gz 4:08 COW related performance regression in 5.19 1:41

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 80 tickets were reviewed or otherwise worked on, 1 change was applied to blead Hours Activity 3.11 #116925 review new discussion #116925 review discussion and update patch 0.47 #119425 review and comment 3.72 #119593 code review and debugging #119593 more debugging, review, produce patch and comment #119593 add explanation to patch 8.53 #121332 applying 5.21.1 blockers patches #121332 more 5.21.1 blockers #121332 apply more 5.21.1 blocker

Tony Cook writes: Approximately 68 tickets were worked on, and 7 patches were applied. Jarkko starts his long stream of patches for Coverity issues this month, which I spent a lot of time reviewing. Hours Activity 3.87 #116925 reply to comments, work on patch changes #116925 reply to comments #116925 work on patch #116925 editing, comment with updated patch 1.40 #119949 review 5.18.3 blockers, backport fix and apply 0.35 #119973

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 April 2014. This month I released versions 1.10, 1.11, 1.12 and 1.13. I finished up the work I was doing to the test system. Part of this included improving the tests for merged databases, and imposing more of an ordering on STDOUT and STDERR within

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