February 2006 Archives

In Toronto last year, there was a pre-YAPC hack-a-thon that brought together many of the Perl 6 coders in person, which can be very productive. TPF provided $600 US to cover costs, and as you can tell by the amount, the group worked as low-budget as possible.

Right now, the week before OSDC Israel, they are repeating the effort. It's clearly a worthy cause, so TPF has agreed to offer $600 US to support them again.

Here's the cool part: Gabor Szabo, one of the organizers has offered us a great deal. He's going to run the conference and collect as much as he can via registration, donation, sponsorship, etc. If he's short, he'll tell us and we'll help out. If not, he'll cover the costs for the people involved in the hack-a-thon. That sure sounds win-win to me.

Only one grant was approved this quarter, but it's fantastic. Nicholas Clark, the current 5.8 Pumpking has applied for an $11,000 grant to improve Perl 5. Some of what he intends to do:

• Fix bugs affecting Unicode handling, Class::DBI, Tk and PAR.
• Allow relocatable Perl installations, which permits developers to distribute applications complete with a bundled Perl.
• Support source filters as part of code references in @INC
• Complete lexical pragmas, a milestone on the way to 5.10
• Further memory saving for 5.10 - previous work saved >33% for hashes and arrays
• Merge Larry's p5-p6 work into core, which will allow others to start contributing to it.

The changes are extremely valuable and will lead to widespread benefit to Perl programmers. We're quite excited about this grant. There are few people more qualified than Nicholas to do this work and the price is a bargain.

On a personal note, I'm particularly excited about his plan to save the regular expression engine state. I've been bit by bugs caused by the regex engine not being re-entrant and I'm hoping this will fix my bugs. Read on for the full text of the grant application.