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

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