perltodo - Perl TO-DO List
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 perl5-porters@perl.org to avoid duplication of effort. 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 ideas, and any discussion about them. One set of archives may be found at:
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/
What can we offer you in return? Fame, fortune, and everlasting glory? Maybe not, but if your patch is incorporated, then we'll add your name to the AUTHORS file, which ships in the official distribution. How many other programming languages offer you 1 line of immortality?
The roadmap to 5.10 envisages feature based releases, as various items in this TODO are completed.
Implement "_ prototype character"
Review smart match semantics in light of Perl 6 developments.
Review assertions. Review syntax to combine assertions. Assertions could take advantage of the lexical pragmas work. "What hooks would assertions need?"
encoding should be turned into a lexical pragma (probably).
encoding
Stabilisation. If all goes well, this will be the equivalent of a 5.10-beta.
Write portable self destruct code for tests to stop them burning CPU in infinite loops. This needs to avoid using alarm, as some of the tests are testing alarm/sleep or timers.
Which is crazy given just how simple POD purports to be, and how simple HTML can be. It's not actually as simple as it sounds, particularly with the flexibility POD allows for =item, but it would be good to improve the visual appeal of the HTML generated, and to avoid it having any validation errors. See also "make HTML install work", as the layout of installation tree is needed to improve the cross-linking.
=item
The addition of Pod::Simple and its related modules may make this task easier to complete.
Pod::Simple
(This probably impacts much more than the core: also the Test::Harness and TAP::* modules on CPAN.)
The core regression test suite is getting ever more comprehensive, which has the side effect that it takes longer to run. This isn't so good. Investigate whether it would be feasible to give the harness script the option of running sets of tests in parallel. This would be useful for tests in t/op/*.t and t/uni/*.t and maybe some sets of tests in lib/.
Questions to answer
How does screen layout work when you're running more than one test?
How does the caller of test specify how many tests to run in parallel?
How do setup/teardown tests identify themselves?
Pugs already does parallel testing - can their approach be re-used?
We should have tests for everything. When all the core's modules are tested, Schwern has promised to donate to $500 to TPF. We may need volunteers to hold him upside down and shake vigorously in order to actually extract the cash.
Use Devel::Cover to ascertain the core modules's test coverage, then add tests that are currently missing.
A full test suite for the B module would be nice.
perlbench seems impervious to any recent changes made to the perl core. It would be useful to have a reasonable general benchmarking suite that roughly represented what current perl programs do, and measurably reported whether tweaks to the core improve, degrade or don't really affect performance, to guide people attempting to optimise the guts of perl. Gisle would welcome new tests for perlbench.
perlbench
Fix the bugs revealed by running the test suite with the -t switch (via make test.taintwarn).
-t
make test.taintwarn
As part of the "dists" plan, anything that doesn't belong in the smallest perl distribution needs to be dual lifed. Anything else can be too. Figure out what changes would be needed to package that module and its tests up for CPAN, and do so. Test it with older perl releases, and fix the problems you find.
threads::shared
Investigate whether threads::shared could share aggregates properly with only Perl level changes to shared.pm
Ilya observed that use POSIX; eats memory like there's no tomorrow, and at various times worked to cut it down. There is probably still fat to cut out - for example POSIX passes Exporter some very memory hungry data structures.
There is a script embed.pl that generates several header files to prefix all of Perl's symbols in a consistent way, to provide some semblance of namespace support in C. Functions are declared in embed.fnc, variables in interpvar.h and thrdvar.h. Quite a few of the functions and variables are conditionally declared there, using #ifdef. However, embed.pl doesn't understand the C macros, so the rules about which symbols are present when is duplicated in makedef.pl. Writing things twice is bad, m'kay. It would be good to teach embed.pl to understand the conditional compilation, and hence remove the duplication, and the mistakes it has caused.
C
#ifdef
embed.pl
Or if you prefer, tasks that you would learn from, and broaden your skills base...
There is an installhtml target in the Makefile. It's marked as "experimental". It would be good to get this tested, make it work reliably, and remove the "experimental" tag. This would include
installhtml
Checking that cross linking between various parts of the documentation works. In particular that links work between the modules (files with POD in lib/) and the core documentation (files in pod/)
Work out how to split perlfunc into chunks, preferably one per function group, preferably with general case code that could be used elsewhere. Challenges here are correctly identifying the groups of functions that go together, and making the right named external cross-links point to the right page. Things to be aware of are -X, groups such as getpwnam to endservent, two or more =items giving the different parameter lists, such as
perlfunc
-X
getpwnam
endservent
=items
=item substr EXPR,OFFSET,LENGTH,REPLACEMENT =item substr EXPR,OFFSET,LENGTH =item substr EXPR,OFFSET
and different parameter lists having different meanings. (eg select)
select
Be able to install them. This would probably need a configure test to see how the system does compressed man pages (same directory/different directory? same filename/different filename), as well as tweaking the installman script to compress as necessary.
Make it easy for anyone to run Devel::Cover on the core's tests. The steps to do this manually are roughly
do a normal Configure, but include Devel::Cover as a module to install (see INSTALL for how to do this)
Configure
make perl
cd t; HARNESS_PERL_SWITCHES=-MDevel::Cover ./perl -I../lib harness
Process the resulting Devel::Cover database
This just give you the coverage of the .pms. To also get the C level coverage you need to
Additionally tell Configure to use the appropriate C compiler flags for gcov
gcov
make perl.gcov
(instead of make perl)
After running the tests run gcov to generate all the .gcov files. (Including down in the subdirectories of ext/
(From the top level perl directory) run gcov2perl on all the .gcov files to get their stats into the cover_db directory.
gcov2perl
.gcov
Then process the Devel::Cover database
It would be good to add a single switch to Configure to specify that you wanted to perform perl level coverage, and another to specify C level coverage, and have Configure and the Makefile do all the right things automatically.
Quite often vendors ship a perl binary compiled with their (pay-for) compilers. People install a free compiler, such as gcc. To work out how to build extensions, Perl interrogates %Config, so in this situation %Config describes compilers that aren't there, and extension building fails. This forces people into choosing between re-compiling perl themselves using the compiler they have, or only using modules that the vendor ships.
%Config
It would be good to find a way teach Config.pm about the installation setup, possibly involving probing at install time or later, so that the %Config in a binary distribution better describes the installed machine, when the installed machine differs from the build machine in some significant way.
Config.pm
Some platforms mandate that you provide a list of a shared library's external symbols to the linker, so the core already has the infrastructure in place to do this for generating shared perl libraries. My understanding is that the GNU toolchain can accept an optional linker specification file, and restrict visibility just to symbols declared in that file. It would be good to extend makedef.pl to support this format, and to provide a means within Configure to enable it. This would allow Unix users to test that the export list is correct, and to build a perl that does not pollute the global namespace with private symbols.
Currently Configure understands -Dusecrosscompile option. This option arranges for building miniperl for TARGET machine, so this miniperl is assumed then to be copied to TARGET machine and used as a replacement of full perl executable.
-Dusecrosscompile
miniperl
perl
This could be done little differently. Namely miniperl should be built for HOST and then full perl with extensions should be compiled for TARGET. This, however, might require extra trickery for %Config: we have one config first for HOST and then another for TARGET.
These tasks would need a little C knowledge, but don't need any specific background or experience with XS, or how the Perl interpreter works
Currently perl from p4/rsync ships with a patchlevel.h file that usually defines one local patch, of the form "MAINT12345" or "RC1". The output of perl -v doesn't report that a perl isn't an official release, and this information can get lost in bugs reports. Because of this, the minor version isn't bumped up until RC time, to minimise the possibility of versions of perl escaping that believe themselves to be newer than they actually are.
p4
rsync
It would be useful to find an elegant way to have the "this is an interim maintenance release" or "this is a release candidate" in the terse -v output, and have it so that it's easy for the pumpking to remove this just as the release tarball is rolled up. This way the version pulled out of rsync would always say "I'm a development release" and it would be safe to bump the reported minor version as soon as a release ships, which would aid perl developers.
This task is really about thinking of an elegant way to arrange the C source such that it's trivial for the Pumpking to flag "this is an official release" when making a tarball, yet leave the default source saying "I'm not the official release".
thrdvar.h and intrpvarh define the "global" variables that need to be per-thread under ithreads, where the variables are actually elements in a structure. As C dictates, the variables must be laid out in order of declaration. There is a comment /* Important ones in the first cache line (if alignment is done right) */ which implies that at some point in the past the ordering was carefully chosen (at least in part). However, it's clear that the ordering is less than perfect, as currently there are things such as 7 bools in a row, then something typically requiring 4 byte alignment, and then an odd bool later on. (bools are typically defined as chars). So it would be good for someone to review the ordering of the variables, to see how much alignment padding can be removed.
/* Important ones in the first cache line (if alignment is done right) */
bool
char
It's also worth checking that all variables are actually used. Perl 5.8.0 shipped with PL_nrs still defined in thrdvar.h, despite it being unused since a change over a year earlier. Had this been spotted before release, it could have been removed, but now it has to remain in the 5.8.x releases to keep the structure the same size, to retain binary compatibility.
PL_nrs
It's probably worth checking if all need to be the types they are. For example
PERLVAR(Ierror_count, I32) /* how many errors so far, max 10 */
might work as well if stored in a signed (or unsigned) 8 bit value, if the comment is accurate. PL_multi_open and PL_multi_close can probably become chars. Finding variables to downsize coupled with rearrangement could shrink the interpreter structure; a size saving which is multiplied by the number of threads running.
PL_multi_open
PL_multi_close
The Perl source code is stable enough that it makes sense to profile it, identify and optimise the hotspots. It would be good to measure the performance of the Perl interpreter using free tools such as cachegrind, gprof, and dtrace, and work to reduce the bottlenecks they reveal.
As part of this, the idea of pp_hot.c is that it contains the hot ops, the ops that are most commonly used. The idea is that by grouping them, their object code will be adjacent in the executable, so they have a greater chance of already being in the CPU cache (or swapped in) due to being near another op already in use.
Except that it's not clear if these really are the most commonly used ops. So as part of exercising your skills with coverage and profiling tools you might want to determine what ops really are the most commonly used. And in turn suggest evictions and promotions to achieve a better pp_hot.c.
In cop.h, we have
struct context { U32 cx_type; /* what kind of context this is */ union { struct block cx_blk; struct subst cx_subst; } cx_u; };
There are less than 256 values for cx_type, and the constituent parts struct block and struct subst both contain some U8 and U16 fields, so it should be possible to move them to the first word, and share space with a U8 cx_type, saving 1 word.
cx_type
struct block
struct subst
U8
U16
Currently all new OP structures are individually malloc()ed and free()d. All malloc implementations have space overheads, and are now as fast as custom allocates so it would both use less memory and less CPU to allocate the various OP structures from arenas. The SV arena code can probably be re-used for this.
malloc
Currently, numerous functions look virtually, if not completely, identical in both win32/wince.c and win32/win32.c files, which can't be good.
win32/wince.c
win32/win32.c
These tasks would need C knowledge, and roughly the level of knowledge of the perl API that comes from writing modules that use XS to interface to C.
PVBM
By removing unused elements and careful re-ordering, the structures for AVs, HVs, CVs and GVs have recently been shrunk considerably. PVIOs probably aren't worth it, as typical programs don't use more than 8, and (at least) Filter::Util::Call uses SvPVX/SvCUR/SvLEN on a PVIO, so it would mean code changes to modules on CPAN. PVBMs might have some savings to win.
AV
HV
CV
GV
PVIO
Filter::Util::Call
SvPVX
SvCUR
SvLEN
Make all autovivification consistent w.r.t LVALUE/RVALUE and strict/no strict;
This task is incremental - even a little bit of work on it will help.
chdir, chmod, chown, chroot, exec, glob, link, lstat, mkdir, open, opendir, qx, readdir, readlink, rename, rmdir, stat, symlink, sysopen, system, truncate, unlink, utime, -X. All these could potentially accept Unicode filenames either as input or output (and in the case of system and qx Unicode in general, as input or output to/from the shell). Whether a filesystem - an operating system pair understands Unicode in filenames varies.
Known combinations that have some level of understanding include Microsoft NTFS, Apple HFS+ (In Mac OS 9 and X) and Apple UFS (in Mac OS X), NFS v4 is rumored to be Unicode, and of course Plan 9. How to create Unicode filenames, what forms of Unicode are accepted and used (UCS-2, UTF-16, UTF-8), what (if any) is the normalization form used, and so on, varies. Finding the right level of interfacing to Perl requires some thought. Remember that an OS does not implicate a filesystem.
(The Windows -C command flag "wide API support" has been at least temporarily retired in 5.8.1, and the -C has been repurposed, see perlrun.)
Currently the %ENV entries are always byte strings.
Investigate trade offs to switch out perl's choices on memory usage. Particularly perl should be able to give memory back.
:unique
The old implementation made bad assumptions on several levels. A good 90% solution might be just to make :unique work to share the string buffer of SvPVs. That way large constant strings can be shared between ithreads, such as the configuration information in Config.
Tainting would be easier to use if it didn't take documented shortcuts and allow taint to "leak" everywhere within an expression.
system() accepts a LIST syntax (and a PROGRAM LIST syntax) to avoid running a shell. readpipe() (the function behind qx//) could be similarly extended.
Maybe create a utility that checks after each libperl.a creation that none of the above (nor sprintf(), vsprintf(), or *SHUDDER* gets()) ever creep back to libperl.a.
nm libperl.a | ./miniperl -alne '$o = $F[0] if /:$/; print "$o $F[1]" if $F[0] eq "U" && $F[1] =~ /^(?:strn?c(?:at|py)|v?sprintf|gets)$/'
Note, of course, that this will only tell whether your platform is using those naughty interfaces.
These tasks would need C knowledge, and knowledge of how the interpreter works, or a willingness to learn.
The old perltodo notes "With gdb, you can attach the debugger to a running program if you pass the process ID. It would be good to do this with the Perl 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.
gdb
The old perltodo notes that lvalue functions don't work for list or hash slices. This would be good to fix.
The old perltodo notes that lvalue functions don't work in the debugger. This would be good to fix.
Study the possibility of adding a new prototype character, _, meaning "this argument defaults to $_".
_
The regexp optimiser is not optional. It should configurable to be, to allow its performance to be measured, and its bugs to be easily demonstrated.
Introduce a new special block, UNITCHECK, which is run at the end of a compilation unit (module, file, eval(STRING) block). This will correspond to the Perl 6 CHECK. Perl 5's CHECK cannot be changed or removed because the O.pm/B.pm backend framework depends on it.
Allow to delete functions. One can already undef them, but they're still in the stash.
so we can override qx// as well.
Make the peephole optimizer optional. Currently it performs two tasks as it walks the optree - genuine peephole optimisations, and necessary fixups of ops. It would be good to find an efficient way to switch out the optimisations whilst keeping the fixups.
Currently contexts are void, scalar and list. split has a special mechanism in place to pass in the number of return values wanted. It would be useful to have a general mechanism for this, backwards compatible and little speed hit. This would allow proposals such as short circuiting sort to be implemented as a module on CPAN.
Allow lexical aliases (maybe via the syntax my \$alias = \$foo.
my \$alias = \$foo
At the moment pp_entersub is huge, and has code to deal with entering both perl and XS subroutines. Subroutine implementations rarely change between perl and XS at run time, so investigate using 2 ops to enter subs (one for XS, one for perl) and swap between if a sub is redefined.
self ties are currently illegal because they caused too many segfaults. Maybe the causes of these could be tracked down and self-ties on all types re- instated.
The old perltodo notes "Look at the "reification" code in av.c".
av.c
Assertions are in the core, and work. However, assertions needed to be added as a core patch, rather than an XS module in ext, or a CPAN module, because the core has no hooks in the necessary places. It would be useful to investigate what hooks would need to be added to make it possible to provide the full assertion support from a CPAN module, so that we aren't constraining the imagination of future CPAN authors.
The tokeniser isn't actually very UTF-8 clean. use utf8; is a hack - variable names are stored in stashes as raw bytes, without the utf-8 flag set. The pad API only takes a char * pointer, so that's all bytes too. The tokeniser ignores the UTF-8-ness of PL_rsfp, or any SVs returned from source filters. All this could be fixed.
use utf8;
char *
PL_rsfp
Tasks that will get your name mentioned in the description of the "Highlights of 5.10"
Generally make ithreads more robust. See also "iCOW"
This task is incremental - even a little bit of work on it will help, and will be greatly appreciated.
One bit would be to write the missing code in sv.c:Perl_dirp_dup.
Sarathy and Arthur have a proposal for an improved Copy On Write which specifically will be able to COW new ithreads. If this can be implemented it would be a good thing.
Fix (or rewrite) the implementation of the /(?{...})/ closures.
/(?{...})/
This will allow the use of a regex from inside (?{ }), (??{ }) and (?(?{ })|) constructs.
To install Env, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm Env
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install Env
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.