News in the Rakudo 2012.06 release

Rakudo development continues to progress nicely, and so there are a few changes in this month's release worth explaining.

Longest Token Matching, List Iteration

The largest chunk of development effort went into Longest-Token Matching for alternations in Regexes, about which Jonathan already blogged. Another significant piece was Patrick's refactor of list iteration. You probably won't notice much of that, except that for-loops are now a bit faster (maybe 10%), and laziness works more reliably in a couple of cases.

String to Number Conversion

String to number conversion is now stricter than before. Previously an expression like +"foo" would simply return 0. Now it fails, ie returns an unthrown exception. If you treat that unthrown exception like a normal value, it blows up with a helpful error message, saying that the conversion to a number has failed. If that's not what you want, you can still write +$str // 0.

require With Argument Lists

require now supports argument lists, and that needs a bit more explaining. In Perl 6 routines are by default only looked up in lexical scopes, and lexical scopes are immutable at run time. So, when loading a module at run time, how do you make functions available to the code that loads the module? Well, you determine at compile time which symbols you want to import, and then do the actual importing at run time:

use v6;
require Test <&plan &ok &is>;
#            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ evaluated at compile time,
#                            declares symbols &plan, &ok and &is
#       ^^^                  loaded at run time

Module Load Debugging

Rakudo had some trouble when modules were precompiled, but its dependencies were not. This happens more often than it sounds, because Rakudo checks timestamps of the involved files, and loads the source version if it is newer than the compiled file. Since many file operations (including simple copying) change the time stamp, that could happen very easily.

To make debugging of such errors easier, you can set the RAKUDO_MODULE_DEBUG environment variable to 1 (or any positive number; currently there is only one debugging level, in the future higher numbers might lead to more output).

$ RAKUDO_MODULE_DEBUG=1 ./perl6 -Ilib t/spec/S11-modules/require.t
MODULE_DEBUG: loading blib/Perl6/BOOTSTRAP.pbc
MODULE_DEBUG: done loading blib/Perl6/BOOTSTRAP.pbc
MODULE_DEBUG: loading lib/Test.pir
MODULE_DEBUG: done loading lib/Test.pir
1..5
MODULE_DEBUG: loading t/spec/packages/Fancy/Utilities.pm
MODULE_DEBUG: done loading t/spec/packages/Fancy/Utilities.pm
ok 1 - can load Fancy::Utilities at run time
ok 2 - can call our-sub from required module
MODULE_DEBUG: loading t/spec/packages/A.pm
MODULE_DEBUG: loading t/spec/packages/B.pm
MODULE_DEBUG: loading t/spec/packages/B/Grammar.pm
MODULE_DEBUG: done loading t/spec/packages/B/Grammar.pm
MODULE_DEBUG: done loading t/spec/packages/B.pm
MODULE_DEBUG: done loading t/spec/packages/A.pm
ok 3 - can require with variable name
ok 4 - can call subroutines in a module by name
ok 5 - require with import list

Module Loading Traces in Compile-Time Errors

If module myA loads module myB, and myB dies during compilation, you now get a backtrace which indicates through which path the erroneous module was loaded:

$ ./perl6 -Ilib -e 'use myA'
===SORRY!===
Placeholder variable $^x may not be used here because the surrounding block
takes no signature
at lib/myB.pm:1
  from module myA (lib/myA.pm:3)
  from -e:1

Improved autovivification

Perl allows you to treat not-yet-existing array and hash elements as arrays or hashes, and automatically creates those elements for you. This is called autovivification.

my %h;
%h<x>.push: 1, 2, 3; # worked in the previous release too
push %h<y>, 4, 5, 6; # newly works in the 2012.06