GSoC progress repor

[Paweł Murias]

All tests in nqp/t/nqp with the exception of test 49 are passing.

Test 49 among other things requires compiling regexes at runtime.

Example: my $regex := "a+";"aaaaa" ~~ /<$regex>/;

This is easy to do after bootstraping (when we have the whole compiler
avaliable at runtime) or a bunch of crafty hacks.
After attempting to quick hack a workaround (which would involve
starting up a new parrot process to cross compile a regex) it turned
out our current cross compiling solution won't work. I decided to
avoid waisting time on that and leave it to after the boostrap.

t/nqp directory in the nqp repository contains all the tests for the
NQP language features.
There are also tests in t/qregex which are really a whole bunch of
regex and their expected results on a suplied string.
(in a tab separated format + a harness).
And 3 tests in t/serialization which would involve a boring
translation of serialization code from a different backend.

What seems to be a good direction is to get all the tests qast tests
(which were written by Jonathan while porting nqp to the jvm) under
JavaScript. They test the backend without requiring a parser. Doing
that has uncovered a number of bugs in nqp-js. Major things like multi
methods seem to work correctly but I have encoutered many small bugs.
Which seems to imply that the nqp test suit needs to be more
exaustive.
A few examples of those and their fixes:

nqp::null() was tested for truthfullness is some places, we are
currently doing that using a .Bool method so I had instead of using a
native javascript null switch to using a custom singleton for
that.https://github.com/pmurias/rakudo-js/commit/896e597f1358a3a51d64a955eb4d013dc4fe2d27

Objects being false by default caused if $slurp {...emit some code for
slurp...} not to
workhttps://github.com/pmurias/rakudo-js/commit/580829d2ea337c57fad19273d232ccfb15b9baa4

\n not being implemented in regexes caused subst(/\n/,"\\n",:global)
to loop infinitly:https://github.com/pmurias/rakudo-js/commit/868b4bdd36cca93287b21e18ebf9ebcb1885d344

Currently in nqp-js I'm using JavaScript arrays as nqp arrays (with a
bunch of methods monkey patched on top of them).
That caused a problem as JavaScript alread has a push and unshift
methods (hinting that it was somewhat inspired by Perl 5).
The tests thus far where using the nqp::push op for adding elements to arrays.
However QAST::Compiler::JavaScript uses the .push method
Example: nqp::push(@foo,$value) vs @foo.push($value).

My current calling convention is that $foo.bar(:a("named"),1) is
translated to $foo.bar(ctx,{"a":"named"},1).

Which ended up in strange things being added into arrays (Which
resulted in some fun debugging).
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