This week’s “most commits across all repositories” award doubtlessly goes to lizmat, who’s been speccing, implementing, and writing tests for supply operations left and right! Here’s what else is new:

FROGGS completed support for loop labels on both NQP and Perl 6 on both the Parrot and MoarVM backends. The code is still in the “loop_labels” branches in each of the repositories, but with it you can assign a label to different kinds of loops and then supply that label to next/last/…

dwarring added yet more advent calendar tests to the test suite.

jnthn gave MoarVM a Repr that can be used to differentiate between a low-level null pointer and a null object. This is then used to make the allocation of $!, $/ and $_ lazy. We have to allocate these for routines, blocks, loops etc, but the user doesn’t use them in every case.

The bytecode specializer of MoarVM is currently learning a few more tricks that make it more useful for Perl 6 code; Currently it only really benefits NQP code. That improves compile speed and build times, but not really run speed.

jnthn has created a release candidate for Rakudo Star 2014.04 – It may be released and announced this evening or tomorrow or something. Watch rakudo.org or subscribe to the perl6-announce mailing list for the announcement.

Thanks to donaldh, rakudo-jvm now also builds the IO::Socket::Async portion of the Core Setting.

colomon wrote a bit on tadzik’s rakudobrew on his blog.

Currently, the “community bonding period” of GSoC is happening. For Parrot’s GSoC project to optimize method signatures, the student is improving the handling of GC Write Barriers. brrt, who is going to implement a dynasm based JIT for MoarVM, has been toying with dynasm and learning the ins and outs of spesh.



I’m still waiting for the recordings from NLPW2014 to surface so I can hear the audio track that goes with jnthn’s slides I linked to in my last post.

I hope y’all have a lovely week 🙂 The weather where I’m at is certainly pretty lovely!