The roadmap to 5.10 envisages feature based releases, as various items in this
TODO are completed.
-=head2 Needed for a 5.9.5 release
+=head2 Needed for the final 5.10.0 release
-=over
-
-=item *
-
-Review smart match semantics in light of Perl 6 developments.
-
-=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> should be turned into a lexical pragma (probably).
-
-=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
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
-
-In F<cop.h>, we have
-
- 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.
-
=head2 Allocate OPs from arenas
Currently all new OP structures are individually malloc()ed and free()d.
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
These tasks would need C knowledge, and roughly the level of knowledge of
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 Implement $value ~~ 0 .. $range
+
+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 "With C<gdb>, you can attach the debugger to a running
Allow to delete functions. One can already undef them, but they're still
in the stash.
-=head2 Make readpipe overridable
-
-so we can override qx// as well.
-
=head2 optional optimizer
Make the peephole optimizer optional. Currently it performs two tasks as
This will allow the use of a regex from inside (?{ }), (??{ }) and
(?(?{ })|) constructs.
-=head2 Add (?YES) (?NO) to regexp enigne
-
-YES/NO would allow a subpattern to be passed/failed but allow backtracking.
-Basically a more efficient (?=), (?!).
-
-demerphq has this on his todo list
-
-=head2 Add (?SUCCEED) (?FAIL) to regexp engine
-
-SUCCEED/FAIL would allow a pattern to be passed/failed but without backtracking.
-Thus you could signal that a pattern has matched or not, and return (regardless
-that there is more pattern following).
-
-demerphq has this on his todo list
-
-=head2 Add (?CUT) (?COMMIT) to regexp engine
-
-CUT would allow a pattern to say "do not backtrack beyond here".
-COMMIT would say match from here or don't, but don't try the pattern from
-another starting pattern.
-
-These correspond to the \v and \V that Jeffrey Friedl mentions in
-Mastering Regular Expressions 2nd edition.
-
-demerphq has this on his todo list
-
=head2 Add class set operations to regexp engine
Apparently these are quite useful. Anyway, Jeffery Friedl wants them.