Author Archives: jnthnwrthngtn

Some years back, I worked on bringing basic debug support to Rakudo Perl 6. It works by taking the program AST and instrumenting it. This approach produced a somewhat useful result, but also carries a number of limitations: It required … Continue reading →

Recently, an open letter was published by Elizabeth Mattijsen, a long-time contributor to the Perl community who has in recent years contributed copiously to Rakudo Perl 6, as well as working to promote Perl (both 5 and 6) at numerous events. The … Continue reading →

Perl 6 encourages the use of high-level constructs when writing concurrent programs, rather than dealing with threads and locks directly. These not only aid the programmer in producing more correct and understandable programs, but they also afford those of us … Continue reading →

So far in this series, I have discussed how the MoarVM dynamic optimizer gathers statistics, uses them to plan what to optimize, and then produces specialized versions of hot parts of a program to speed up execution. In this final part, I’ll look at … Continue reading →

Finally, after considering gathering data and planning what to optimize, it’s time to look at how MoarVM’s dynamic optimizer, “spesh”, transforms code into something that should run faster. Specialization The name “spesh” is short for “specializer”, and this nicely captures the overall approach … Continue reading →

Vienna.pm have funded me to work 50 hours on Perl 6. After some discussion, we decided I would first work on improving the thread pool scheduler, and then move on to continuing the work around non-blocking await, a feature of the upcoming Perl … Continue reading →

It’s been a good while since I posted part 1 of this little series. In the meantime, I paid a visit to the Swiss Perl Workshop, situated in a lovely hotel in the beautiful village of Villars. Of course, I was working … Continue reading →