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