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