2017.39 Smarting up the Pool

Jonathan Worthington elaborates on his new ThreadPool implementation in an extensive blog post, which was made possible by the sponsoring of Vienna.pm. A recommended read if you want to keep up to date on the features and performance of asynchronous processing with Rakudo Perl 6! In short, there are now 3 queues internally: one for timers, one for workers that sequentially process, and one for general purpose activity. There’s now also a “Sufficiently Smart Supervisor” thread that looks at the state of the other threads about 100x per second and decides if adding more threads would make sense or not. Exciting times!

Performance analysis tooling

Timo Paulssen submitted a grant proposal to improve the performance analysis tools of Rakudo Perl 6. Judging by the comments so far, he’s not the only one wanting to see this happen. Please leave your comments if you also have an opinion about this proposal!

Other Core Developments

Jonathan Worthington was responsible for the most of last weeks commits. I guess everybody else was just watching in awe, or busy with things that didn’t make it into the main rakudo repo just yet. Notable exceptions are:

• Samantha McVey finally fixed the last bugs in the utf8-c8 encoding: this is the encoding that tries to encode as utf8, but which creates temporary synthetic codepoints for those sequences that are not valid UTF-8, instead of giving up.
• David Warring made sure that subtypes actually have an .isa method.
• And some other minor fixes and improvements.

Other Blog Posts

• Relevance of Pumpking Perl 5? by jamesmp98.
• Clone Wars by p6steve.
• Minoca OS automation with Sparrowdo by Alexey Melezhik.
• Can Rakudo Perl 6 grammar capabilities make it easier to implement a universal linter and code checker? by Adhrain.
• Taint mode for Rakudo Perl 6? by tektektektektek.
• Module Ecosystem and Documentation: Rakudo Perl 6 versus Pumpking Perl 5 by Tom Browder.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Rakudo Linux packages by Claudio Ramirez.
• Split PDF files by chapter by Moritz Lenz.
• Rakudo Perl 6 Deep Dive by Safaribooks.
• Something like rcpp or cython? by सुमन‏.
• A lot of Deep Dive by Zoffix Znet.
• Updated Rakudo Perl 6 Book Flowchart by Moritz Lenz.
• $?USAGE is now $*USAGE by Zoffix Znet.
• $*INITTIME to be deprecated for $*INIT-INSTANT by Zoffix Znet.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

• Colored match, some regex interpolation works and some don’t; color code inconsistent by lisprogtor.
• NativeCall. How to get a string as a parameter of a C function by Yuriy Zhilovets.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Can’t adverb and infix by Luca Ferrari.
• Help with map and regexp by Luca Ferrari.
• DateTime.Str default formatter with sprintf is pretty slow by Thor Michael Støre.
• bash and pm6 question by ToddAndMargo.
• Chaining substitutions? by ToddAndMargo.
• Why can’t I “write”? by ToddAndMargo.
• Overwrite? by ToddAndMargo.
• Need a second pair of eyes by ToddAndMargo.

Ecosystem Additions

• META6::To::Man by Tom Browder.
• Geo::Ellipsoid by Tom Browder.

Winding Down

Apart from all the visible work Jonathan and Samantha have done this week, there was a lot going on behind the scenes. One of them promises to make object creation in Rakudo Perl 6 at least 10% faster. Too bad we couldn’t report about it this week. So be sure to check out the next issue of the Perl 6 Weekly!