Re: Patches that will come...

On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 11:32:43PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 11:16:41PM +0100, Tim Bunce wrote:
> 
> > It maybe that the gains achieved from implementing Perl5 types as PMCs,
> > and other planned changes, may be sufficient to raise performance to the
> > point where the presumed gains from removing ref-counting are less important.
> 
> Were the goals of ponie ever written down?
> My impression was that performance (and improving it) wasn't actually
> a priority. The principle reason was for compatibility, to make perl5's
> killer app (the code on CPAN) immediately available to perl6, and hence
> remove one perl5 to perl6 transition hurdle.

By performance I only meant getting performance of ponie to match perl5.
If it stays significantly below perl5 then ponie will stay as a
side-project and not become the primary focus of perl5-porters
and the wider community.


> > Is there any reason it can't be moved further down the priority list?
> > Seems more like a nice-to-have than being truely essential to ponie.
> > (And may well end up being a can of worms.)
> 
> The principle reason I wanted to see if it can be made to work is
> because having perl5 PMCs properly GCed means that there is no hassle in
> passing them to non-perl5 routines, and non-perl5 routines storing them in
> their parrot native GCed aggregates and it all just working.
> 
> I'm not convinced (admittedly after only 2 minutes' thought) that
> refcounting PMCs, either via our own refcount, or letting parrot track
> how many times we registered them, is going to work smoothly when we
> pass them outside ponie. Whereas I think that having the refcount/GC
> boundary at the RV/AV/HV/stack API presented to XS code will work.
> (as there there are clear definitions of who owns references, unlike
> on the perl stack as used internally between perl functions)
> 
> Please correct me if I'm wrong. I know I've not thought of everything here.

Neither have I - and I'm sure you're better placed to judge the
technical issues.

My point isn't a technical one, it's a pragmatic one. Right now ponie
has about 3 developers, it seems, and progress is slow. The closer
ponie gets to being seen as a viable perl 5.11 the more developers will
join in.

So I'm saying that the priority for ponie should be to become
perl 5.11 because by doing so you'll gather a larger developer
community and so much more will get done faster.

We need to get to the tipping point.

Tim.