Some Requests from Rakudo

[Christoph Otto]

Earlier today at YAPC::EU, jnthn mentioned a number of features and
needs that would be especially helpful to Rakudo.  I though I ought to
relay those items.  They are as follows.

1) Threading - this isn't a pressing concern right now, but we'll need
   to something about it in the near future.  nine, (a.k.a. Stefan
   Seifert) dropped by #parrot and is apparently here at yapc.  I'll try
   to find him.  From what I've heard he's interested in helping
   Rakudo's threading, which means whipping Parrot's threading into
   shape.  In the event that he's interested, I'd like to ask for a
   mentor to guide him through Parrot's guts and help him get working
   quickly.  Ideally this would be someone who's looked at the threading
   code and has some familiarity with the existing code.

2) Asynchronous I/O - This also isn't urgent, but will become
   increasingly important.  People have come to Rakudo and said that
   they'd start hacking on web apps once A I/O was implemented.  We need
   to figure out what primitives we need to provide to HLLs, then
   provide them.

3) sub cloning -  (This is primarily a memory usage change, not a speed
   improvement.)  Perl 6 is a very closure-heavy language.  Our sub
   cloning code copies a lot of data that doesn't actually vary between
   sub.  Someone (possibly me) needs to dig into this, do some
   profiling and figure out the best way to avoid cloning the bits that
   don't change.

4) PCC - while Rakudo uses a custom binder, nqp doesn't and is sensitive
   to the speed of Parrot's non-:call_sig calling conventions.
   Profiling, refactoring and general performance improvements would
   make Rakudo happier by speeding up their build.  Additionally, we
   need to be sure that :call_sig is as fast as we can make it.  I
   suspect that it is, but verifying this would be helpful.

5) invocation - Separate from PCC itself, we need to profile and
   optimize sub invocation.

I've been having a great time at yapc, especially seeing some of the
really cool stuff being done on top of Rakudo.  Parrot has a great
opportunity to improve Rakudo's foundation, and by doing so to advance
what people expect of dynamic languages.  I'm excited by the opportunity
and hope we'll be up to the task.

Thanks, Christoph