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