Seven Days between the Parrot and the Camel

from Monday, December 21 to Sunday, December 27 in the year 2009

Considering the Language:

The spec remained quiet during Christmas.

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Considering Rakudo:

Apart from some core setting work by Solomon Foster and David Romano, the ng branch was silent.

The master branch learned :s for getting file sizes.

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Considering Parrot:

Work is going on to make PIRC easier to build. (PIRC is an alternative PIR compiler with a yacc/bison grammar and a flex-generated lexer. It is meant to replace the IMCC compiler.) The pirc_config branch has been created for adding a --pirc configure option. The goal is to make using PIRC an option before Parrot 2.0.

Will Coleda (a.k.a coke) improved the optional automatic testing of make dependencies (tools/dev/checkdepend.pl) and fixed many of the reported errors.

Christoph Otto cleaned up the description of the bytecode format in PDD 13 and made packfiles somewhat smaller and faster by omitting redundant pc → filename mappings.

Peter Lobsinger and Kevin Tew continued work in the pmc_freeze_cleanup branch that aims at cleaning up and unifying PMC freeze/thaw serialization and packfile reading/writing.

Geoffrey Broadwell has completed the migration of plumage glue code to nqp-rx. All regexes are written in nqp-rx now, so PGE is no longer required. All plumage-specific code has been removed from Util.nqp in order to prepare the file for possible inclusion as a library in the nqp-rx distribution. However, Util.nqp still needs tests and a ticket has been opened in order to encourage contributors. There is also a document explaining how to add tests to plumage.

[As mistakenly reported for week 51,] Bob Kuo, a.k.a. bubaflub, celebrated his new commit bit with a firework of changes, converting many further tests to PIR among other things.

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