Rakudo.org

It's been quite a while since I've written any articles about Rakudo's progress, but the delay in articles has been because I've been really focused on code development for a number of things we're going to need quickly for Rakudo Star.

Since I got back from my travels in Asia - actually, as soon as I'd got a good night's sleep after the long flight - I've been busily hacking away on my latest Hague Grant. In fact, I've done rather little else. After a couple of weeks of work - with many late nights debugging - I've finally reached the first major milestone of the grant: the new signature binder has landed.

So what is a signature binder anyway? It's the thing that takes the signature on a block (or some more interesting type of code object, such as a sub or a method) along with the arguments that it was invoked with and - if possible - binds them against the signature, such that the arguments passed end up in the correct variables. It sounds relatively simple, and in some senses it is. However, Perl 6 signatures offer a lot of powerful features, making things rather less trivial.

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce
the September 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #21 "Seattle".
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1].
The tarball for the September 2009 release is available from
http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the frequent
addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we recommend building Rakudo
from the latest source, available from the main repository at github.

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce
the August 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #20 "PDX".
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1].
The tarball for the August 2009 release is available from
http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the
frequent addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we continue
to recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtain
the latest source directly from the main repository at github.
More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo .

Between vacations and conferences, I've not done a Vienna.pm Rakudo Day for a little while. Anyway, today I took the opportunity to spend the day doing Rakudo improvements before tomorrow's monthly release.

I still remember the sunlight on your face that warm November day,
And I still remember my heartbeat quickened by desire, unaware of prices I would pay
I still remember the closing door the night we said goodbye,
And I still remember losing you for good and knowing that a part of me had died
Memory - Redemption

Sorry it's been a while since I last posted - YAPC::Europe and preparing for it were something of a distraction, as has been visiting some family and friends, though the real killer has been that in the last month I've managed to have myself a couple of colds/flu-ish things that left me without a great deal of energy during a lot of the time I've been here at home and working. Anyway, I think I've almost shaken off the current infection, and amongst it all I've been able to keep my Hague Grant moving along - in so far as the code, if not the blogging.

One of the big pieces of my grant that I've been working on is improving Rakudo's support for introspecting classes and roles. Before I started working on this, Rakudo didn't really have any such support. Of course, Parrot provided all of the primitives. But there was some work to be done in building up an implementation of the Perl 6 introspection interface around it.

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce
the June 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #19 "Chicago".
Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1].
The tarball for the July 2009 release is available from
http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the
frequent addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we continue
to recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtain
the latest source directly from the main repository at github.

Over the next couple of weeks I'm working on fleshing out "job openings" and descriptions for people who want to help advance Rakudo Perl 6. I'll write more about this in a later post, and they're likely to appear in my OSCON and YAPC::EU talks.

What don't kill you will make you more strong
Broken, Beat & Scarred - Metallica

The largest, trickiest part of my current Hague Grant has been an extensive refactor of method dispatch. It's the second major refactor of method dispatch that I have done in the course of Rakudo's development, and while I know there's going to be some tweaks from here to address some more subtle aspects of the semantics, I'm very hopeful that this will have been the last major refactor needed on the path to a Rakudo 1.0.

I'm back from a nice break in Italy and have been digging back in to Perl 6 stuff again. Today I've been doing a Vienna.pm-funded Rakudo day, and here's what I got up to.