The roadmap to 5.10 envisages feature based releases, as various items in this
TODO are completed.
-=head2 Needed for a 5.9.4 release
+=head2 Needed for the final 5.10.0 release
-=over
-
-=item *
-
-Review assertions. Review syntax to combine assertions. Assertions could take
-advantage of the lexical pragmas work. L</What hooks would assertions need?>
-
-=item *
-
-C<encoding::warnings> should be turned into a lexical pragma.
-C<encoding> should, too (probably).
-
-=back
-
-=head2 Needed for a 5.9.5 release
-
-=over
-
-=item *
-Implement L</_ prototype character>
-
-=item *
-Implement L</state variables>
-
-=back
-
-=head2 Needed for a 5.9.6 release
-
-Stabilisation. If all goes well, this will be the equivalent of a 5.10-beta.
+Review perlguts. Significant changes have occured since 5.8, and we can't
+release a new version without making sure these are covered.
=head1 Tasks that only need Perl knowledge
=head2 Parallel testing
+(This probably impacts much more than the core: also the Test::Harness
+and TAP::* modules on CPAN.)
+
The core regression test suite is getting ever more comprehensive, which has
the side effect that it takes longer to run. This isn't so good. Investigate
whether it would be feasible to give the harness script the B<option> of
=head2 Make Schwern poorer
-We should have for everything. When all the core's modules are tested,
+We should have tests for everything. When all the core's modules are tested,
Schwern has promised to donate to $500 to TPF. We may need volunteers to
hold him upside down and shake vigorously in order to actually extract the
cash.
-See F<t/lib/1_compile.t> for the 3 remaining modules that need tests.
-
=head2 Improve the coverage of the core tests
-Use Devel::Cover to ascertain the core's test coverage, then add tests that
-are currently missing.
+Use Devel::Cover to ascertain the core modules's test coverage, then add
+tests that are currently missing.
=head2 test B
It would be good to teach C<embed.pl> to understand the conditional
compilation, and hence remove the duplication, and the mistakes it has caused.
-
-
-
-
-
=head1 Tasks that need a little sysadmin-type knowledge
Or if you prefer, tasks that you would learn from, and broaden your skills
as
=item substr EXPR,OFFSET,LENGTH,REPLACEMENT
-
=item substr EXPR,OFFSET,LENGTH
-
=item substr EXPR,OFFSET
and different parameter lists having different meanings. (eg C<select>)
coverage, and have C<Configure> and the F<Makefile> do all the right things
automatically.
-=head2 Make Config.pm cope with differences between build and installed perl
+=head2 Make Config.pm cope with differences between built and installed perl
Quite often vendors ship a perl binary compiled with their (pay-for)
compilers. People install a free compiler, such as gcc. To work out how to
export list is correct, and to build a perl that does not pollute the global
namespace with private symbols.
+=head2 Cross-compile support
+Currently C<Configure> understands C<-Dusecrosscompile> option. This option
+arranges for building C<miniperl> for TARGET machine, so this C<miniperl> is
+assumed then to be copied to TARGET machine and used as a replacement of full
+C<perl> executable.
+This could be done little differently. Namely C<miniperl> should be built for
+HOST and then full C<perl> with extensions should be compiled for TARGET.
+This, however, might require extra trickery for %Config: we have one config
+first for HOST and then another for TARGET.
=head1 Tasks that need a little C knowledge
could shrink the interpreter structure; a size saving which is multiplied by
the number of threads running.
-=head2 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.
-
-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>.
+=head2 Profile Perl - am I hot or not?
-=head2 Shrink struct context
+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.
-In F<cop.h>, we have
+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.
- struct context {
- U32 cx_type; /* what kind of context this is */
- union {
- struct block cx_blk;
- struct subst cx_subst;
- } cx_u;
- };
-
-There are less than 256 values for C<cx_type>, and the constituent parts
-C<struct block> and C<struct subst> both contain some C<U8> and C<U16> fields,
-so it should be possible to move them to the first word, and share space with
-a C<U8> C<cx_type>, saving 1 word.
+Except that it's not clear if these really are the most commonly used ops. So
+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 Allocate OPs from arenas
the various OP structures from arenas. The SV arena code can probably be
re-used for this.
+=head2 Improve win32/wince.c
+
+Currently, numerous functions look virtually, if not completely,
+identical in both C<win32/wince.c> and C<win32/win32.c> files, which can't
+be good.
+=head2 Use secure CRT functions when building with VC8 on Win32
+Visual C++ 2005 (VC++ 8.x) deprecated a number of CRT functions on the basis
+that they were "unsafe" and introduced differently named secure versions of
+them as replacements, e.g. instead of writing
+
+ FILE* f = fopen(__FILE__, "r");
+
+one should now write
+
+ FILE* f;
+ errno_t err = fopen_s(&f, __FILE__, "r");
+
+Currently, the warnings about these deprecations have been disabled by adding
+-D_CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE to the CFLAGS. It would be nice to remove that
+warning suppressant and actually make use of the new secure CRT functions.
+
+There is also a similar issue with POSIX CRT function names like fileno having
+been deprecated in favour of ISO C++ conformant names like _fileno. These
+warnings are also currently suppressed with the compiler option /wd4996. It
+might be nice to do as Microsoft suggest here too, although, unlike the secure
+functions issue, there is presumably little or no benefit in this case.
=head1 Tasks that need a knowledge of XS
so it would mean code changes to modules on CPAN. C<PVBM>s might have some
savings to win.
-=head2 Implicit Latin 1 => Unicode translation
-
-Conversions from byte strings to UTF-8 currently map high bit characters
-to Unicode without translation (or, depending on how you look at it, by
-implicitly assuming that the byte strings are in Latin-1). As perl assumes
-the C locale by default, upgrading a string to UTF-8 may change the
-meaning of its contents regarding character classes, case mapping, etc.
-This should probably emit a warning (at least).
-
-This task is incremental - even a little bit of work on it will help.
-
=head2 autovivification
Make all autovivification consistent w.r.t LVALUE/RVALUE and strict/no strict;
running a shell. readpipe() (the function behind qx//) could be similarly
extended.
+=head2 strcat(), strcpy(), strncat(), strncpy(), sprintf(), vsprintf()
+
+Maybe create a utility that checks after each libperl.a creation that
+none of the above (nor sprintf(), vsprintf(), or *SHUDDER* gets())
+ever creep back to libperl.a.
+
+ nm libperl.a | ./miniperl -alne '$o = $F[0] if /:$/; print "$o $F[1]" if $F[0] eq "U" && $F[1] =~ /^(?:strn?c(?:at|py)|v?sprintf|gets)$/'
+
+Note, of course, that this will only tell whether B<your> platform
+is using those naughty interfaces.
+
+=head2 Audit the code for destruction ordering assumptions
+
+Change 25773 notes
+
+ /* Need to check SvMAGICAL, as during global destruction it may be that
+ AvARYLEN(av) has been freed before av, and hence the SvANY() pointer
+ is now part of the linked list of SV heads, rather than pointing to
+ the original body. */
+ /* FIXME - audit the code for other bugs like this one. */
+adding the C<SvMAGICAL> check to
+ if (AvARYLEN(av) && SvMAGICAL(AvARYLEN(av))) {
+ MAGIC *mg = mg_find (AvARYLEN(av), PERL_MAGIC_arylen);
+Go through the core and look for similar assumptions that SVs have particular
+types, as all bets are off during global destruction.
+
+=head2 Extend PerlIO and PerlIO::Scalar
+
+PerlIO::Scalar doesn't know how to truncate(). Implementing this
+would require extending the PerlIO vtable.
+
+Similarly the PerlIO vtable doesn't know about formats (write()), or
+about stat(), or chmod()/chown(), utime(), or flock().
+
+(For PerlIO::Scalar it's hard to see what e.g. mode bits or ownership
+would mean.)
+
+PerlIO doesn't do directories or symlinks, either: mkdir(), rmdir(),
+opendir(), closedir(), seekdir(), rewinddir(), glob(); symlink(),
+readlink().
=head1 Tasks that need a knowledge of the interpreter
These tasks would need C knowledge, and knowledge of how the interpreter works,
or a willingness to learn.
-=head2 lexical pragmas
+=head2 Implement $value ~~ 0 .. $range
-Document the new support for lexical pragmas in 5.9.3 and how %^H works.
-Maybe C<re>, C<encoding>, maybe other pragmas could be made lexical.
+It would be nice to extend the syntax of the C<~~> operator to also
+understand numeric (and maybe alphanumeric) ranges.
=head2 Attach/detach debugger from running program
The old perltodo notes that lvalue functions don't work in the debugger. This
would be good to fix.
-=head2 _ prototype character
-
-Study the possibility of adding a new prototype character, C<_>, meaning
-"this argument defaults to $_".
-
-=head2 state variables
-
-C<my $foo if 0;> is deprecated, and should be replaced with
-C<state $x = "initial value\n";> the syntax from Perl 6.
-
=head2 regexp optimiser optional
The regexp optimiser is not optional. It should configurable to be, to allow
its performance to be measured, and its bugs to be easily demonstrated.
-=head2 UNITCHECK
+=head2 delete &function
-Introduce a new special block, UNITCHECK, which is run at the end of a
-compilation unit (module, file, eval(STRING) block). This will correspond to
-the Perl 6 CHECK. Perl 5's CHECK cannot be changed or removed because the
-O.pm/B.pm backend framework depends on it.
+Allow to delete functions. One can already undef them, but they're still
+in the stash.
=head2 optional optimizer
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.
=head1 Big projects
This will allow the use of a regex from inside (?{ }), (??{ }) and
(?(?{ })|) constructs.
+
+=head2 Add class set operations to regexp engine
+
+Apparently these are quite useful. Anyway, Jeffery Friedl wants them.
+
+demerphq has this on his todo list, but right at the bottom.
+
+
projects / p5sagit/p5-mst-13.2.git / blobdiff