1 Always check out the latest perl5-porters discussions on these subjects
2 before embarking on an implementation tour.
5 VecArray Implement array using vec()
6 SubstrArray Implement array using substr()
7 VirtualArray Implement array using a file
8 ShiftSplice Defines shift et al in terms of splice method
11 pack "(stuff)*", "(stuff)?", "(stuff)+", "(stuff)4", ...
12 contiguous bitfields in pack/unpack
14 bundled perl preprocessor/macro facility
15 this would solve many of the syntactic nice-to-haves
16 use posix calls internally where possible
17 gettimeofday (possibly best left for a module?)
19 -i rename file only when successfully changed
20 all ARGV input should act like <>
21 report HANDLE [formats].
22 support in perlmain to rerun debugger
23 regression tests using __DIE__ hook
24 lexically scoped functions: my sub foo { ... }
25 wantlvalue? more generalized want()/caller()?
26 named prototypes: sub foo ($foo, @bar) { ... } ?
27 regression/sanity tests for suidperl
28 iterators/lazy evaluation/continuations/first/
29 first_defined/short-circuiting grep/??
30 This is a very thorny and hotly debated subject,
31 tread carefully and do your homework first
32 generalise Errno way of extracting cpp symbols and use that in
33 Errno, Fcntl, POSIX (ExtUtils::CppSymbol?)
34 the _r-problem: for all the {set,get,end}*() system database
35 calls (and a couple more: readdir, *rand*, crypt, *time,
36 tmpnam) there are in many systems the _r versions
37 to be used in re-entrant (=multithreaded) code
38 Icky things: the _r API is not standardized and
39 the _r-forms require per-thread data to store their state
40 memory profiler: turn malloc.c:Perl_get_mstats() into
41 an extension (Devel::MProf?) that would return the malloc
42 stats in a nice Perl datastructure (also a simple interface
43 to return just the grand total would be good)
44 a way to make << and >> to shift bitvectors instead of numbers
48 optimize (use less qw[memory cpu])
51 constant function cache
54 cache eval tree (unless lexical outer scope used (mark in &compiling?))
56 shrink opcode tables via multiple implementations selected in peep
57 cache hash value? (Not a win, according to Guido)
58 optimize away @_ where possible
59 tail recursion removal
60 "one pass" global destruction
61 rewrite regexp parser for better integrated optimization
62 LRU cache of regexp: foreach $pat (@pats) { foo() if /$pat/ }
65 ref function in list context?
66 make tr/// return histogram in list context?
67 loop control on do{} et al
68 explicit switch statements
70 compile to real threaded code