=head1 DESCRIPTION
-This is a list of wishes for Perl. The tasks we think are smaller or
-easier are listed first. Anyone is welcome to work on any of these,
-but it's a good idea to first contact I<perl5-porters@perl.org> to
-avoid duplication of effort, and to learn from any previous attempts.
-By all means contact a pumpking privately first if you prefer.
+This is a list of wishes for Perl. The most up to date version of this file
+is at http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/pod/perltodo.pod
+
+The tasks we think are smaller or easier are listed first. Anyone is welcome
+to work on any of these, but it's a good idea to first contact
+I<perl5-porters@perl.org> to avoid duplication of effort, and to learn from
+any previous attempts. By all means contact a pumpking privately first if you
+prefer.
Whilst patches to make the list shorter are most welcome, ideas to add to
the list are also encouraged. Check the perl5-porters archives for past
The addition of C<Pod::Simple> and its related modules may make this task
easier to complete.
+=head2 Make ExtUtils::ParseXS use strict;
+
+F<lib/ExtUtils/ParseXS.pm> contains this line
+
+ # use strict; # One of these days...
+
+Simply uncomment it, and fix all the resulting issues :-)
+
+The more practical approach, to break the task down into manageable chunks, is
+to work your way though the code from bottom to top, or if necessary adding
+extra C<{ ... }> blocks, and turning on strict within them.
+
=head2 Parallel testing
(This probably impacts much more than the core: also the Test::Harness
Although I can see that as confusing, given that C<$Config{d_link}> is true
when (hard) links are available.
+=head2 Configure Windows using PowerShell
+
+Currently, Windows uses hard-coded config files based to build the
+config.h for compiling Perl. Makefiles are also hard-coded and need to be
+hand edited prior to building Perl. While this makes it easy to create a perl.exe
+that works across multiple Windows versions, being able to accurately
+configure a perl.exe for a specific Windows versions and VS C++ would be
+a nice enhancement. With PowerShell available on Windows XP and up, this
+may now be possible. Step 1 might be to investigate whether this is possible
+and use this to clean up our current makefile situation. Step 2 would be to
+see if there would be a way to use our existing metaconfig units to configure a
+Windows Perl or whether we go in a separate direction and make it so. Of
+course, we all know what step 3 is.
+
=head1 Tasks that need a little C knowledge
These tasks would need a little C knowledge, but don't need any specific
the perl API that comes from writing modules that use XS to interface to
C.
+=head2 Remove the use of SVs as temporaries in dump.c
+
+F<dump.c> contains debugging routines to dump out the contains of perl data
+structures, such as C<SV>s, C<AV>s and C<HV>s. Currently, the dumping code
+B<uses> C<SV>s for its temporary buffers, which was a logical initial
+implementation choice, as they provide ready made memory handling.
+
+However, they also lead to a lot of confusion when it happens that what you're
+trying to debug is seen by the code in F<dump.c>, correctly or incorrectly, as
+a temporary scalar it can use for a temporary buffer. It's also not possible
+to dump scalars before the interpreter is properly set up, such as during
+ithreads cloning. It would be good to progressively replace the use of scalars
+as string accumulation buffers with something much simpler, directly allocated
+by C<malloc>. The F<dump.c> code is (or should be) only producing 7 bit
+US-ASCII, so output character sets are not an issue.
+
+Producing and proving an internal simple buffer allocation would make it easier
+to re-write the internals of the PerlIO subsystem to avoid using C<SV>s for
+B<its> buffers, use of which can cause problems similar to those of F<dump.c>,
+at similar times.
+
=head2 safely supporting POSIX SA_SIGINFO
Some years ago Jarkko supplied patches to provide support for the POSIX
debugger on a running Perl program, although I'm not sure how it would be
done." ssh and screen do this with named pipes in /tmp. Maybe we can too.
-=head2 Optimize away empty destructors
-
-Defining an empty DESTROY method might be useful (notably in
-AUTOLOAD-enabled classes), but it's still a bit expensive to call. That
-could probably be optimized.
-
=head2 LVALUE functions for lists
The old perltodo notes that lvalue functions don't work for list or hash
=head2 Investigate PADTMP hash pessimisation
-The peephole optimier converts constants used for hash key lookups to shared
+The peephole optimiser converts constants used for hash key lookups to shared
hash key scalars. Under ithreads, something is undoing this work.
See http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2007-09/msg00793.html
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