This Week on perl5-porters - 20-26 January 2008

From: David Landgren

Date: January 31, 2008 14:16

Subject: This Week on perl5-porters - 20-26 January 2008

Message ID: 47A2482C.3060804@landgren.net

January 31, 2008 14:16This Week on perl5-porters - 20-26 January 2008

This Week on perl5-porters - 20-26 January 2008 "Adding new lists of things [to remember] to a language is only a good idea if you're making money with certification." -- Juerd Waalboer, on why your program shouldn't have to plead to use new functionality. Topics of Interest More C for Perl programmers The "I know Perl, how to learn C" thread continued this week with a number of book and and web site references given. The thread then veered off into a discussion of memory alignment issues, what is a word (in computer memory parlance) and other sundry technical arcana of great interest to C programmers. Many people pointed out (quite rightly) that K&R is still a very good read. after all these years http://xrl.us/bevz4 Regression with autobox Alexandr Ciornii discovered that "Perl_ck_subr" lost its public status in the API somewhere between 5.8 and 5.10. This resulted in a compilation failure on Windows for "autobox", the hippest module on the block. He noted that he could provoke the same behaviour on Linux if he removed the "PERL_CORE" preprocessor definition. Silence ensued. and I thought autobox wasn't yet core http://xrl.us/bevz8 Make Perl Y2038 safe Michael G. Schwern saw no reason why date operations involving results that pushed out beyond 2038 (and thus wrap around the 32 time_t quantity) should not just do The Right Thing. No takers. hopefully I shall be retired by then http://xrl.us/bev2a Making perl5 crosscompilable (or adventures in "autoconf") Enrico Weigelt reported that he had managed to set up an "autoconf"-based technique for building perl. This would allow him to make it easier to cross-compile Perl. He had managed to build the core interpreter but was stuck on how to build the standard extensions. The porters explained that they were unlikely to move away from the current "metaconf" system, since it allows the source to build build on many non-GNU, non-POSIX hosts. People tried to explain how the current cross-compilation mechanism works but it appears that few people have any real experience in the matter. No "autoconf" experts were able to answer Enrico's questions concerning how to build extensions, either. A work in progress http://xrl.us/bev2e Decade old regexp tainting bug? Nicholas Clark uncovered an ancient bug in the regexp code. It started of with a boolean value that was able to take values other than 0 and 1, which was a nice touch. It turned out that it was then binary-or'ed with a bit that happened to lie way past the most significant bit of the datatype being used to hold the boolean. Since the bit in question was to indicate that the pattern was tainted, we have a bit of a problem on our hands. The first thing was able to see whether it was possible to construct a test case that could expose the flawed behaviour. Rick Delaney was first past the post with a test that demonstrated the problem, and a fix that produced the correct behaviour. Ben Morrow proposed a different test, that Abigail tweaked to show that the problem existed all the way back to 5.004. This was important, for the code the Nicholas found was traced back to change #267, committed to the repository in 1997. Unfortunately, the change was a jumbo patch that changed all sorts of things in the regexp engine. ye olde bugge http://xrl.us/bev2i http://public.activestate.com/cgi-bin/perlbrowse/p/267 Dear C gurus Nicholas Clark discovered that an innocuous change to perl.c created a "argument 'flags' might be clobbered by `longjmp' or `vfork'" warning and wondered what needed to be done to the code in order to make "gcc" happy again. Zefram and Hugo van der Sanden explained that the "flags" variable needed to be made "volatile". Zefram went on to explain why it was so, in sufficient detail to merit the badge of "resident C guru". http://xrl.us/bev2k "Module::Build" interim release Ken Williams wanted to integrate the changes that were required to get 5.10 out the door back into the mainline "Module::Build" codebase. Most of the changes are test tweaks to skip troublesome issues on VMS. Craig Berry agreed that the VMS porters ran out of time in the run-up to 5.10, and it would be nice to go back and tidy up the loose ends. mopping up http://xrl.us/bev2n Unshifting PL_curstack is a no-no? Nicholas Clark was up to his elbows as usual, grovelling around in pp.c and pp_hot.c, seeing if you could shift elements off "PL_curstack". Presumably to make things go faster. After watching things blow up for a while, he concluded that what he wanted to do couldn't be done. not that I really understood anything http://xrl.us/bev2t Binding operators, void context, and documentation Kaye Offer wondered why "$foo =~ /(bar)/;" in void context does not warn, but "$foo !~ /(bar)/;" does. Aristotle Pagaltzis and Rafael Garcia-Suarez did a pretty good job of explaining why thing were the way they were. it's a feature http://xrl.us/bev2v Reviving the perl compiler Reini Urban announced that he had taken a look at the perl compiler that had been removed from the 5.10.0 release. He lavished sufficient care upon it to get to compile again, although there were problems with the test suite. Reini thought that the simple stack-based op-tree could be JITted easily into machine code and was looking at the GNU lightning library. He wanted to know if anyone else had had a look at this approach before. Nicholas Clark explained that overloaded or tied SVs make JITting *really* hard, and that some of the ops were so high-level that JITting them would produce copious amounts of machine instructions which in turn would make a mess of a CPU instruction cache. Joshua ben Jore pointed to Marc Lehmann's Faster project, that takes a Perl routine and turns it into C. http://xrl.us/bev2x Floats to strings issue Jerry D. Hedden asked why "Configure" probes for alternatives to "sprintf" that produce identical behaviour to "sprint("%g")", and why not just use "sprintf" and be done with it. Andy Dougherty explained that some platforms, such as Solaris, have alternate functions available in the system C library that offer much better performance. In such cases, "Configure" favours them over "sprintf". only the best http://xrl.us/bev23 Updating "Runops::Switch" - problem testing "OP_SAY" Jim Cromie discovered that "Runops::Switch" needed a tweak to recognise the new "say" in 5.10 and made a preliminary patch to get it to work. Rafael upgraded the module in any event, but Jim's patch reminded Jan Dubois that people should never link directly to the "Perl_pp_*" routines, since they are not part of the public API. http://xrl.us/bev25 "perl5.6.2 -e 'delete $ENV{PATH}'" segfault on Solaris 10 Ralf Hack provided a recipe for people to follow, should they be stuck on a modern Solaris with an old perl, and attempt to delete environment variables. one day this might happen to *you* http://xrl.us/bev27 Win32 precision configuration Following on from change #33049 when warnings about loss of precision were tweaked, Nicholas Clark noticed that the win32/config.bc file failed the Don't Repeat Yourself principle, and wondered whether it would be possible to have it generated automatically. Steve Hay mumbled something about keeping things in sync and having a mind to write a script to do it, but not actually having got around to doing something about it. low itch factor http://xrl.us/bev29 "struct context" now 12.5% smaller than 5.10 Nicholas Clark was as pleased as Punch after pulling out an "IV" and a pointer from "struct context". And after thinking about it a bit more, thought of another possible restructuring to save a bit more space. Benjamin Smith took Nicholas's second idea and coded a patch to implement it, and in the process discovered another improvement that Nicholas missed initially. At the end, Nicholas applied all the discovered slimming goodness to blead. nest scopes with impunity http://xrl.us/bev3b "lc(undef)" is not "undef": bug or feature? Alberto Simões was a little surprised to learn that "lc(undef)" returns the empty string, and does not warn when doing so. Abigail reminded people that Perl's "undef" is not like SQL's "null" with its capacity to turn everything it touches to "null". Perl will turn "undef" into zero or the empty string as appropriate and will warn when it does so, if you ask for it. Jonathon Rockway noticed that "\L", "\u" and the like also behaved the same way. Michael G. Schwern bet the contents of a capture variable that "\L" and "lc" were implemented using the same underlying opcode, which was confirmed by a quick glance at toke.c. Rafael Garcia-Suarez added some code to make things warn, along with a few regression tests as change #33088. He hoped that people would bang on it and see if anything breaks. in that case http://xrl.us/bev3d A warning I'd like to see David Nicol wished that a warning would be issued when map was fed a reference to an array, instead of an array. This reminded Aristotle Pagaltzis that this was exactly the thing that Mark-Jason Dominus's proposal a few weeks ago was designed to approach: raising a warning when a reference is directly stringified or numified. Juerd Waalboer pointed out "map" takes a list, and an arrayref is merely a one element list. In fact, you cannot do anything other than give a list to map. It just might not contain what you thought it should. http://xrl.us/bev3j Extra stricture for hard refs in 5.12 Following on from the above thread, Aristotle then restarted the "references should not stringify" discussion, which covered more or less the same ground as it did last month. Michael G. Schwern summed it up pretty well "there are times when you just want an object to stringify, usually for debugging purposes, and there are times when you don't, usually for production purposes." At the moment, no-one knows how to reconcile these differences, although Ben Morrow revealed a clever use of "Hash::Util::Fieldhash". http://xrl.us/bev3m Not a pad error Elsewhere in his wanderings around the codebase, Nicholas Clark caught sight of an oddity in "pp_enteriter" (that sets up a "foreach" loop). He thought that be undoing an 8 year old change by Gurusamy Sarathy, it should be possible to provoke the bug the change was designed to fix. But, rather surprisingly, the code continued to work anyway. Dave Mitchell's work on lexical and closure cleanups for 5.10 turned out to simplify matters considerably which in turn allows Nicholas to chop out a certain amount of redundant checks. unexpected bonus http://xrl.us/bev3q Patches of Interest Robin Barker had a look a "Devel::DProf" and noticed a certain amount of cruft that he was able to prune, some that had been lying around since 1999. Applied. all gone http://xrl.us/bev3y http://xrl.us/bev34 http://xrl.us/bev4a He then took a couple of stabs at making a warning about a volatile declaration go away. Unapplied. http://xrl.us/bev32 http://xrl.us/bev36 Steven Schubiger did some consting goodness of his own, and added a bit to util.c. Applied. it's all good http://xrl.us/bev4g Watching the smoke signals Steve Hay was busy smoking Perl this week, and both 5.8 and 5.11 were complaining during the compilation stage and falling apart in the tests. Smoke [5.8.8] 33008 FAIL(F) MSWin32 WinXP/.Net SP2 (x86/2 cpu) http://xrl.us/bev4i Smoke [5.11.0] 33018 FAIL(F) MSWin32 WinXP/.Net SP2 (x86/2 cpu) http://xrl.us/bev4k Jarkko Hietaniemi reported a failure compiling with C++ on a Tru64 Alpha. Steve Peters couldn't find any problems when using g++, but thankfully Solaris's C++ compiler obligingly fell over, which allowed him to compose a first patch to get IPC::SysV up and running again. Jarkko followed up with an improved patch to do the same on Tru64. Rafael applied this, which then caused Solaris to break again, so Steve had to go back and tweak the tweak. Smoke [5.11.0] 33016 FAIL(XM) OSF1 V5.1 (EV6/4 cpu) http://xrl.us/bev4n New and old bugs from RT "state" variable not available (#49522) Dave Mitchell worked out what the problem was with Abigail's state variables, tracing it to a problem with the "Svf_PADSTALE" flag, which meant, in the context of state variables, that the variable had not been initialised, rather than having gone out of scope. A few lines of code, some tests, and the job was done. affairs of state http://xrl.us/bev4z "strict" now uses "caller", unintended interaction with "Safe" (#50084) Simon Cozens reported that he had heard from the Postgresql developers running into trouble embedding Perl in Pg. Their simple recipe that worked in 5.8 no longer works in 5.10, as "strict" makes use of "caller" and the latter is not in the default list of permitted operations. Probably not a major deal, but probably something that needs to be documented. playing it safe http://xrl.us/bev47 Bug in regcomp code leading to panic (#50114) "mls" provided a one-liner that produces a panic in 5.10 with a regular expression. The report went as far to identify the offending code and make a suggestion as to how it might be fixed. http://xrl.us/bev49 "enc2xs -C" scans the current directory (#50116) "mls" also suggested that "enc2xs" (part of the "Encode" distribution, to add new encodings to perl) should not search "." when "-C" is used. http://xrl.us/bev5b panic: attempt to copy freed scalar (#50142) Johan Vromans posted the nth bug report concerning a problem with an explicit shift of @ARGV within a subroutine. Dave Mitchell explained that it was a long-standing bug due to the fact that items weren't reference counted on the stack, and that perl really ought to start doing the right thing. http://xrl.us/bev5d "File::Temp" and unsafe shell characters (#50146) Ed Avis was alarmed to discover that if you move into a directory named `rm -rf /`, ask "File::Temp" to create a file in said directory and open the file, you can be in a lot of trouble if it's the super-user that's running the script. To counter this, Ed felt that "File::Temp" should ensure that anything it returned to client code should be filtered to strip out shellish meta-characters. Mark Overmeer pointed out that the problem doesn't exist with the 3-arg form of "open" and that maybe the best solution was to deprecate the 2-arg form in 5.12. shell game http://xrl.us/bev5f "-W" and spurious 'will not stay shared' message (#50160) Eric Promislow had some code that developed a tricky regexp with a "(??{...})" construct and wondered why it issued a "will not stay shared" warning. Dave Mitchell explained that one should always use package variables with the "??{...}" construct, at least until 5.12 at the earliest. http://xrl.us/bev5h "pos" is much slower with "progressive match" and unicode (#50250) Heinz Knutzen discovered that a simple loop involving a "pos" was about 2000 times slower in 5.10 compared with 5.8.8. Dave Mitchell profiled the code and discovered that "Perl_utf_length" was soaking up an inordinate number of cycles. This led him to conclude that there was something broken in the UTF-8 length cache code. http://xrl.us/bev5m Segfault on "perl -e 'split //, unpack "(B)*", "ab"'" (#50256) mauke reported this crash on 5.10.0 (and it looks like it was there in 5.8.8 as well). No-one ventured a reason as to why. http://xrl.us/bev5o Perl5 Bug Summary 317 new + 1482 open = 1799 (11 created this week) http://xrl.us/bev5q http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html This is the BBC PadWalker A recent change (#33030) by Nicholas Clark broke PadWalker. But PadWalker being what it is, no-one was really surprised. http://xrl.us/bev3o In Brief Jerry D. Hedden made the "installperl" target not complain about finding "perl" in the build directory. http://xrl.us/bev3u H.Merijn Brand reported good results with his "Configure" and metaunits work. He was down to 16 warnings, and the promise of several files that could be removed from the branch once everything was wrapped up. Andy Dougherty rejoiced. and we all breathed a sigh of relief http://xrl.us/bevzs Andy Dougherty suggested a pre-5.005-compatible patch to "Configure" to get the 5.8.9 snapshot to compile on IRIX. Alas, David Cantrell reported no joy. http://xrl.us/bevzw Elsewhere in the push to bring on 5.8.9, Alexey Tourbin noticed that a recent change was causing tests to fail in "Term::ReadLine::Gnu" http://xrl.us/bev2c Steven Schubiger had a "make test" fail with copious reports of "undefined symbol: __stack_chk_fail_local". No-one ventured a reason as to what or why things blew up. try make distclean http://xrl.us/bev2g Yamashina Hio wrote some POD in English which was fine, but the same POD in Japanese failed to produce correct text for link references. No-one was able to provide any clues. http://xrl.us/bev2p Nicholas Clark made t/op/inc.t happy again, regarding the overflowing of an integer following an increment (change #33049) http://xrl.us/bevz2 Andreas König reported that the All Perl Changes (APC) repository now deals with 5.10 correctly, and all sorts of tarballs of assorted versions of Perl are available. and there was much rejoicing http://xrl.us/bev2r Regarding the BBC and "Apache::DB", Richard Foley wondered if there was a parallel with the problems he was having with other modules with Apache on 5.10, such as "B::TerseSize". http://xrl.us/bev2z Abigail added some regression tests to t/cmd/for.t to ensure that "for reverse .." does not break one day. http://xrl.us/bev38 Jerry D. Hedden wrote a patch tp suppress imprecision warnings in t/op/64bitint.t. Applied by Nicholas. http://xrl.us/bev4c Jan Dubois pointed out that "socketpair()" *is* available on Win32, and has been for quite some time (as in, prior to 5.8). only the documentation was buggy http://xrl.us/bev4e About this summary This summary was written by David Landgren. In last week's summary, I explained that Moritz Lenz was disappointed that a regexp would not recurse into an interpolated "qr//". In actual fact it does, and Moritz was really wishing that it wouldn't. Apologies to those confused by my confusion. Aristotle Pagaltzis also noticed that my xrl.us short linkifier has no error checking, and it spewed garbage into last week's summary. the code dies screaming http://xrl.us/bevzq last week's http://xrl.us/bev3h Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, (subscription: perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org). The archive is at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/. Corrections and comments are welcome. If you found this summary useful, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.



