Perl 6 notes from February 2011

Lately real life has prevented me from blogging, so here are just a few random notes from the Perl 6 developers:

The Perl bug tracker now has tags testneeded and testcommitted, which can mark tests that need or have tests in the spectest suite. Since the URLs for querying these tags are unwieldy and non-obvious, I've created some aliases: http://rakudo.de/testneeded and http://rakudo.de/testcommitted.

Development of the new nqp and rakudo-on-the-new-object-model is progressing nicely. I had some fun porting some PIR code to NQP, and writing some new code. Most interesting to read is the source of the new meta model, much of which is written in a subset of Perl 6 (so quite readable, if you happen to know Perl 6. For example you can see how the method resolution order for multiple inheritance is calculated.

There is a parrot branch that adds a generation garbage collector to parrot. Its release is planned for shortly after the 3.1.0 release due tomorrow. Initial benchmarks show that Rakudo is between 25% and 30% faster on that parrot, as measured by a spectest run. I very much look forward to having that in the parrot main line.

Writing code for niecza is quite a nice experience. It still has a big startup cost, but then runs much faster than rakudo (at least it feels that way). There are still lots of features missing (for example non-integer number literals), but feature requests are usually implement quite quickly.