2014.23: Beginning of inlining, some GSoC work materializes, DSON encoder/decoder

In order to smooth the transition back to the “every monday” schedule, I decided to write this post on tuesday instead of monday. Here’s some of the things that have happened since last wednesday:

• Filip Sergot added HTTP::UserAgent (but only ::Simple so far) to the ecosystem.
• brrt has been working on the MoarVM JIT based on DynASM, but it seems like there’s a problem regarding dynamic register usage in DynASM. Still, with only static registers, a JIT could remove the overhead introduced by decoding and dispatching opcodes in the interpreter, better performance with the CPU cache, …
• Chirag Agrawal and Reini Urban had been improving parrot s pmc2c and PMCs by removing nested method calls and unneeded write barriers. It doesn t break the rakudo build, but performance measurements are still to be done. PMC write barriers can now also be manually optimized. See this changelog patch for some more details.
• jnthn has started work on letting MoarVM’s spesh inline code at specialize-time. Currently, NQP won’t start with it, but just looking at the log output shows a few nice opportunities already being considered for inlining.
• dwarring put more tests into the test suite for the advent calendar posts.
• donaldh worked on the socket tests for JVM and async socket tests in general.
• XFix wrote a decoder and encoder for DSON, a very promising data serialization format. It’s derived from JSON::Tiny and re-uses a lot of its code; it’s a nice example for subclassing grammars: Compare the Actions.pm from JSON::Tiny and the Actions.pm from Acme::DSON.
• the dyncall version included in some of our repositories were causing trouble on FreeBSD. That was worked on.
• Ulti split off the statistics functions from his BioInfo module into a stats module. It currently has mostly average-related things.
• FROGGS put all the necessary stuff in place to allow slangs to be written in Pure Perl 6 and is going to modify his v5 module to be written in Perl 6 rather than NQP in the future.
• Larry Wall added two nice bits to STD.pm: Don’t throw errors about deprecated special variables inside signatures and warn about duplicated characters in character classes. For anybody looking to get into rakudo development, porting these patches to Rakudo would be a very nice low-hanging fruit.

Thank you for your patience. May your week be a pleasant one 🙂