NAME

What's Broken in Parrot Right Now

PURPOSE

This is a list of items we think are broken in Parrot at the current revision. It's not a list of bugs -- it's a list of missing and broken features that prevent developers from working on their parts of the system.

Committers, please add to the list as you find things and remove from the list as you resolve things.

Missing Features

Ways to emulate these would be nice too.

• Lexical Classes

• Anonymous Classes

• Submethods

Broken Features

• Existing Code Marked As Broken

  Lots of comments in the code read XXX, ???, FIXME, or UNIMPL. Fix them.

• Lexical Pads

  Autrijus Tang has details.

• Nested *Struct PMCs Share State

  chromatic has a test case almost ready to show this.

• setattribute Sometimes Misses

  https://rt.perl.org/rt3//Ticket/Display.html?id=36411

Unfinished Opcodes

• split

  https://rt.perl.org/rt3//Ticket/Display.html?id=32544

  Will Coleda suggested s/regexp/perl 6 rule/ and using PGE. Patrick Michaud suggests making split work only on constant strings and using PGE for everything else.

Missing Vtables

• ResizablePMCArray

  https://rt.perl.org/rt3//Ticket/Display.html?id=31867

• ResizableIntegerArray

  https://rt.perl.org/rt3//Ticket/Display.html?id=32374

• splice

  https://rt.perl.org/rt3//Ticket/Display.html?id=34394

Missing PDDs

• Embedding (PDD 10)

  https://rt.perl.org/rt3//Ticket/Display.html?id=33918

• Assembly (PDD 12)

  https://rt.perl.org/rt3//Ticket/Display.html?id=33919

• Bytecode (PDD 13)

  https://rt.perl.org/rt3//Ticket/Display.html?id=33920

Language-Specific Items

• Make Perl a /language

  • Don't have Perl deps in static classes

    https://rt.perl.org/rt3//Ticket/Display.html?id=32642

  • Make Perl PMCs dynamic

    https://rt.perl.org/rt3//Ticket/Display.html?id=32646

• Let languages be self contained

  https://rt.perl.org/rt3//Ticket/Display.html?id=31633

  Right now many languages are in the MANIFEST, using the global config, etc. As far as Perl goes, this could let us move Perl PMCs into languages/perl[6]).

Obsolete Features

• Everything in DEPRECATED

Miscellaneous

• Generate accurate file/line number information in stack traces.

• Get name of parrot executable

  https://rt.perl.org/rt3//Ticket/Display.html?id=33923

• Namespaces

  Matt Diephouse has prepared an email on this.

• Give invokable PMCs a canonical way to store their associated HLL source and argument information.

  Will Coleda is thinking about this.

• Add rules engines for perl5-ish RE's in PGE.

  Will Coleda specifically wants http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TclCmd/re_syntax.htm, but having a P5-ish one to subclass would be just dandy. Patrick Michaud thinks this is doable.

• Allow Runtime Compiler Registration

  Leo suggests an eventual startup sequence of:

  • start main in src/parrot.c

  • determine source file type to compile/run

  • handle execution over to xxx-compiler or to pbc-run.

  Currently src/parrot.c does nothing and startup occurs in imcc/main.c.