Rakudo.org

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the June 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #18 "Pittsburgh". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1]. The tarball for the June 2009 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

A while back, I did a Rakudo day and didn't get around to writing a report (probably because I hacked until the point where all I wanted to do was sleep). The main thing I did on that day was implement .wrap and .unwrap, which I'm going to talk about in this post.

The .wrap method on a routine allows you to modify it in place, giving it some extra behaviors before (optionally) delegating or calling the original. This allows for pre-processing of arguments, post-processing of return values, logging and so forth.

Aurora swims in the ether
Emerald fire scars the night sky
Amber streams from Sol
Are not unlike the waves of the sea
Nor the endless horizon of ice
Not Unlike The Waves - Agalloch

After the successful completion of my previous Hague Grant, I applied for another one. Happily, it was approved a little while ago, and I've been busily working away on it. In fact, I have already made significant progress towards most of the deliverables (though with plenty of work left to do) and one of them can be considered pretty much completed already. I plan to write several blog posts about the various things I achieve under the grant, and in this one I am going to talk about parallel dispatch, which is the topic of the completed deliverable.

I enjoy masak++'s blogging a lot for the extra little bits as well as the main content, and am taking a leaf from his book and augmenting each of my posts about my work under this grant with a quote. I listen to a lot of music while working, so I've chosen to quote some of the lyrics from what I'm listening to while working on this grant. And yes, I know, it sure doesn't beat the lolcat bible. So, on with the show...

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the May 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #17 "Stockholm". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1]. The tarball for the May 2009 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

I scheduled this week's Rakudo day to take place just before this month's release, and used most of it for fixing bugs. Before I dug into that, I spent some time looking over the change log and adding a few things that it was missing. As in April, we're going to have a really quite impressive release this month with lots of new features and improvements. It's great to be part of such a productive team, and I'm quite proud of what we're achieving together.

Up until today in Rakudo, when your program failed in some way, the errors were not too helpful because they missed a line number and file name that related to the original source code; instead, it told you about a position in the generated intermediate code. Various of us (pmichaud++, Tene++, me++) have been doing bits to get us towards being able to show line numbers at the Perl level rather than in the Parrot Intermediate Code. Today I coded up one of the final bits, and things are looking better. If you have for example this program:

class A {
    method b {
        die "OH NOES I HAS A FAIL"
    }
}
sub bar {
    A.new.b;
}
sub foo {
    bar()
}
foo();

Will now fail with:

OH NOES I HAS A FAIL
in method A::b (crash.p6:3)
called from sub bar (crash.p6:7)
called from sub foo (crash.p6:10)
called from Main (crash.p6:12)

Rakudo day was a little but non-day-ish this week, and instead ended up spread over a couple of days. This was mostly as a result of me accidentally scheduling it on a national holiday, then being unable to resist the temptation of going and enjoying some nice food and beer, sat outside enjoying the evening warmth. Anyway, between the work yesterday and today, we've some new stuff. :-)

Since I missed a couple of Rakudo days in the middle of last month, thanks to the excellent Nordic Perl Workshop and the hackathon that followed it, I did an extra one today to get caught up with them a bit and to keep things moving.

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the April 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #16 "Bratislava". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1]. The tarball for the April 2009 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

This week I've been at the Nordic Perl Workshop 2009; both the conference and hackathon have been outstanding. The NPW organizers and other Oslo hosts have been fantastic. Things have been happening so quickly that there's been little time to report on them. We'll be having a "wrap-up meeting" shortly, and after that I'll make a longer post summarizing the many things that have been accomplished with Perl 6 and Rakudo.