I am writing this in an auditorium on Carnegie Mellon University. This is the official start of YAPC and I am waiting for the keynote speeches.

I ate dinner with Larry Wall last night (well, sat near him). I spent the last 2 days in a Parrot workshop with a handful of parrot implementers.

I’m excited what the next few days will bring. Being social is much easier with other people who share interests. Ironically, perl mongers are very social people.

Last night I finally resolved a problem with the Rakudo test harness. I am fairly new to the perl development model, so I spent the last week or so gaining an understanding. I still have a plenty to learn, but I eventually learned what I needed to do to (temporarily) get changes into the parrotcode.

There is a long post on the Rakudo blog about what’s currently happening in Rakudo. I figured I’d just briefly mention a little bit more detail a few things that I had to figure out manually.

The harness is located in t/harness. The test harness builds a list of files based on the t/spectest_regression.dat. From there, it will run the t/spec/fudge script to update the tests for the Rakudo implementation (noted by the ?rakudo lines). Only after this happens are the tests run.

I found that I was not running all of the tests and the fudge script was complaining by only throwing a help message. This was happening because I had some svn locks that needed to be cleaned up. I created a patch that threw a warning and skips the test. I submitted the patch through the slick perl RT system (this tracking system is pretty amazing, it converts mailing list reports to patches and bug reports) that resolves this problem.

Lets hope this will be the first of many patches. As of last night, there were over 2100 tests being passed. This is due to the diligent work of being placed in the spectest. From here, I will try to help Auzon mark each of the skipped tests and submit RT tickets accordingly.

I’ve been increasingly interested in partaking in perl6 development as of late. I have been keeping up with the various efforts and perl headlines. I even bought the first perl6 book when it was first released.

Lately, I have been keeping an svn checkout of parrot up to date making sure it compiles properly. The most popular implementation of perl6 appears to currently be Rakudo, which is perl6 on parrot. I was originally following the pugs implementation in haskell but was completely turned off by the language of choice. My attention was forced elsewhere due the primary developer losing focus, abandoning pugs.

Being written in PASM (Parrot Assembly Language), it has received plenty of attention. Also, because it is distributed (temporarity) with parrot in the languages section, there is no short supply of active developers.

Pugs did give the perl6 community one great thing: a starting point for the test suite. As of right now, all of the rakudo tests are pulling the test suite from the pugscode repo. This is a great starting point for any implementation and helps centralize the entire perl6 test suite (the pugscode suite is largely incomplete).

Last night, I was discussing the current state of the perl6 implementations with a few of the developers in the IRC #perl6 channel. I was caught up on what’s going on in the community and found a focus. My urge to write some slick new perl6 code can be satiated by working on the pugscode suite. Eventually, I’d like to start solving those problems in the Rakudo implemtation as well.

We’d like you to join us as a author for Pugs.

My interest and enthusiasm must have impressed someone, because one of the developers gave me commitbit access to the pugscode repo. If I submit enough quality patches to parrot/rakudo, I will get parrot/rakudo commit access as well. While pugs itself may be abandonware, the test suite is still the most advanced yet and is in active development.

Join me in #perl6 and help propel perl6 into history as the most powerful language available, yet again.