Even though the previous post was a bit late and so this one covers a few days less, there’s interesting things to report. This week, raiph sent me a little summary of IRC activity again, which made it much easier for me. So thanks!

And now let’s see about those developments:

hoelzro has continued work on the pod documentation attaching to entities (methods, classes, variables, …)

Will Coleda worked on cleaning up our spectest suite a bunch.

brrt has continued work on the JIT, namely making invocations work (both the spesh-improved “fast” invocation and the regular “slow” invocation).

There is now also a log that shows what opcodes end up being jitted and which opcodes cause the JIT to bail out due to NYI or other reasons.

Using this log, brrt concentrated on a bunch of opcodes that commonly cause bails.

Even I got some work in this week, namely having been inspired to hack on the JIT a bit myself; a bunch of ops can be compiled to regular C function calls, and those are sufficiently easy to add. I’ve added support for: checkarity (which is responsible for giving run-time errors for wrong numbers of arguments if we couldn’t determine that at compile time) push_o, pop_o, shift_o and unshift_o (to access lists and such) atpos_o (getting an object in a list by index) getattr_s (accessing a named attribute of an object; with help from brrt).

Additionally, jnthn pointed out that deconts on containers that are quite simple (just a pointer indirection) can be spesh’d to look exactly like a spesh’d attribute access, so I was able to add support to spesh to simplify some deconts (which is an operation that used to cause the jit to bail out extremely often).

The top ops causing the JIT to bail during the compilation of CORE.setting are now: “graphs_s” (which seems to be in every piece of code that follows “getattr_s” + “flattenropes”) “ifnonnull” (100% of the “atpos_o” bails turned into “ifnonnull” bails) param_rp_o (grab a required positional parameter) newlexotic (related to exception handling) the decont ops that were not spesh’d away.

Sadly, MoarVM’s JIT compiler isn’t invoked at all in the case of On-Stack-Replacement optimized code, so none of our current benchmarks will show any change between JIT and no-JIT.

jnthn has started on the long-awaited rewrite of MoarVM’s string handling. Here’s a benchmark from jnthn’s machine comparing last month’s release of MoarVM, the strref branch of MoarVM and last year’s rakudo-parrot. (so no JIT yet). Across the board there’s improvements, but the most important improvement can be seen in the benchmarks that have “concat” in their names. These are the ones that concatenate strings.

(so no JIT yet). Across the board there’s improvements, but the most important improvement can be seen in the benchmarks that have “concat” in their names. These are the ones that concatenate strings. jnthn greatly improved the metaoperator parsing in rakudo. The parser used to barf when it saw rather unwieldy operators with disambiguating brackets in them and set operations and such, for example (|)= or metaops with reductions like [[*]]=.

jnthn also merged the “lex2loc” branch that allows the Optimizer to turn lexical variables into locals if we can prove that they’re not accessed outside the frame they’re in. All backends benefit from this.

psch finished the implementation of the translate operator “tr///” and its return value.

thanks to japhb, more perl6-bench improvements landed.

A whole bunch of work has been put into improving the POD to HTML rendering by Mouq, lue and atroxaper, like the Pod::SAX, Pod::Walker, and an HTML renderer based on both of these modules.

retupmoca added a module for interfacing with RabbitMQ to the ecosystem, called Net::AMQP.

lizmat worked some more on S22 and the related tests and did some more discussion about details with the community.

lizmat and retupmoca fixed problems for Supplies that are .tap’d multiple times.

masak added a module Data::Pretty that will give common things you might want to “say” a friendlier output.

sergot posted about adding both a high level and a low level wrapper for OpenSSL on his blog.

And if you’re interested in getting into Perl 6 Module Development, you could adopt bbkr’s MongoDB related modules BSON and MongoDB.

The next releases are going to happen soon-ish. On Thursday, MoarVM is going to be released and the NQP + Rakudo release is going to follow this week, too.

Thank you for reading and may your week be filled with adorable kitties (or something equivalently cuddly, if you’re allergic).