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