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