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Wed, 05 Aug 2009

Rakudo "star" announced


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(Update:: Here is the "official" blog post from pmichaud - which pretty much makes my rambling superfluous.)

Yesterday Patrick Michaud announced that he'll release a special version of Rakudo called Rakudo star in Spring 2010. Sadly I was not present, but as minor minion I picked some things up on IRC and want to provide some backgrounds.

Alias bitched about the term "Spring", which is a rather regional thing and of course he is right. I'd like to clarify that we are talking about spring on the northern hemisphere, so the release will probably be between March and June.

The idea behind this release is to provide something more shiny than our usual development releases, get good press for it, and motivate lots of people to use it. We need that for several reasons:

  • A release is the only way to get good testing from a wide audience; we learned as much from the perl-5.10.0 release, for which many new bugs were only found after the release.
  • Many Perl 5 programmers are vaguely excited about Perl 6, but wait for a "real thing" before they spend more time on it. We want to show these people that Rakudo has become a "real thing" by now, and implements much of the language.
  • We want to encourage hackers to port their Perl 5 modules to Perl 6. For them it's a good way to learn Perl 6, for the rest of the community it provides a valuable ecosystem. Perl is a good example of how a great collection of libraries can greatly enhance a languages popularity - we'd like to have such a bonus for Perl 6 too.

Currently the Rakudo developers mostly focus on features that are either at the very heart of Perl 6, or that are needed for bootstrapping. Examples for the first category re the object model, multi dispatch and regexes/grammars. The second category covers features like contextual variables, proto regexes and longest token matching.

I expect the focus to (temporarily) shift towards other features, like improved module loading/importing and maybe speedups. But still there are areas that not yet actively pursued - the roadmap does not even mention concurrency/threads. So we hope for volunteers to step up and champion their pet projects.

In the last few months various pieces of PR helped to bring more people into the Perl 6 community. I hope that the Rakudo star release will boost that and will help to form a healthy Perl 6 community.

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Adam Kennedy wrote

The spring thing really does grate
You'll note that Strawberry is released as January/April/July/October. I was really tempted to use southern seasons, just for the hell of it.

Moritz wrote

YaY
I can see your annoyance about many people using some terms to mean totally different things than they mean to you, so I think it would be a quite humorous way to tell them about it.

And I hope you don't mind that I called it "bitching", it wasn't meant all that negatively, rather with a twinkle in the eye.

Chris Darroch wrote


I'm interested in the comment that the roadmap doesn't mention concurrency or threads. I'm quite interested in those aspects of Perl6 but lack the time to dig in deeply or do much beyond reading the blogs.

Is there anyone out there with some thoughts on what has to happen in Rakudo and/or Parrot to support the wide set of features described in S17?

S17 mentions the "unify" Haskell project which merges an event loop with a threading model through the use of continuations. The doc Moritz mentions (at http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~lipeng/homepage/unify.html) is certainly a very interesting read but also contains some fairly complex stuff (such as Figure 3!)

How do people actively involved with the project feel about the subject at the moment?

Moritz wrote

Concurrency
They feel that they need somebody to work on it :-)

Rakudo is based on Parrot, and Parrot has a threads + events implementation (it used to have STM too, but that was bitrotted and was thrown out again). Sadly parrot segfaults when you start a thread in a non-trivial namespace, and that meant the end of an early attempt to bring threads to Rakudo.

There's a bug report sitting in parrot's bug tracker with the description, and it waits for a champion to fix it.

As far as I can tell the threads system was written by Allison, but she is currently busy with more important tasks (a big refactor of the calling conventions from which we hope to get a good speedup, for example)

Chris Darroch wrote

Re: Concurrency
Thank you, that was more up-to-date info than I've been able to find eleswhere. Do you happen to have the Parrot bug number to hand by any chance? I did a quick trawl through trac.parrot.org but it didn't leap out at me. I doubt I'll have to time to dig into it, but I'm interested nonetheless, and it might help others, I suppose, to have it listed here.

Thanks for the response, and for all the blog in general!

Moritz wrote

Concurrency: bug number
It seems to be #757, "Problem with threads and HLLs",
https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/757

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