Or if you prefer, tasks that you would learn from, and broaden your skills
base...
-=head2 Relocatable perl
-
-The C level patches needed to create a relocatable perl binary are done, as
-is the work on F<Config.pm>. All that's left to do is the C<Configure> tweaking
-to let people specify how they want to do the install.
-
=head2 make HTML install work
There is an C<installhtml> target in the Makefile. It's marked as
a binary distribution better describes the installed machine, when the
installed machine differs from the build machine in some significant way.
-=head2 make parallel builds work
-
-Currently parallel builds (such as C<make -j3>) don't work reliably. We believe
-that this is due to incomplete dependency specification in the F<Makefile>.
-It would be good if someone were able to track down the causes of these
-problems, so that parallel builds worked properly.
-
=head2 linker specification files
Some platforms mandate that you provide a list of a shared library's external
could shrink the interpreter structure; a size saving which is multiplied by
the number of threads running.
-=head2 am I hot or not?
+=head2 Profile Perl - am I hot or not?
-The idea of F<pp_hot.c> is that it contains the I<hot> ops, the ops that are
-most commonly used. The idea is that by grouping them, their object code will
-be adjacent in the executable, so they have a greater chance of already being
-in the CPU cache (or swapped in) due to being near another op already in use.
+The Perl source code is stable enough that it makes sense to profile it,
+identify and optimise the hotspots. It would be good to measure the
+performance of the Perl interpreter using free tools such as cachegrind,
+gprof, and dtrace, and work to reduce the bottlenecks they reveal.
+
+As part of this, the idea of F<pp_hot.c> is that it contains the I<hot> ops,
+the ops that are most commonly used. The idea is that by grouping them, their
+object code will be adjacent in the executable, so they have a greater chance
+of already being in the CPU cache (or swapped in) due to being near another op
+already in use.
Except that it's not clear if these really are the most commonly used ops. So
-anyone feeling like exercising their skill with coverage and profiling tools
-might want to determine what ops I<really> are the most commonly used. And in
-
turn suggest evictions and promotions to achieve a better F<pp_hot.c>.
+as part of exercising your skills with coverage and profiling tools you might
+want to determine what ops I<really> are the most commonly used. And in turn
+suggest evictions and promotions to achieve a better F<pp_hot.c>.
=head2 Shrink struct context
C<my $foo if 0;> is deprecated, and should be replaced with
C<state $x = "initial value\n";> the syntax from Perl 6.
+Rafael has sent a first cut patch to perl5-porters.
=head2 regexp optimiser optional
the full assertion support from a CPAN module, so that we aren't constraining
the imagination of future CPAN authors.
+=head2 Properly Unicode safe tokeniser and pads.
+
+The tokeniser isn't actually very UTF-8 clean. C<use utf8;> is a hack -
+variable names are stored in stashes as raw bytes, without the utf-8 flag
+set. The pad API only takes a C<char *> pointer, so that's all bytes too. The
+tokeniser ignores the UTF-8-ness of C<PL_rsfp>, or any SVs returned from
+source filters. All this could be fixed.
+
https://perl5.git.perl.org / perl5.git / blobdiff