October 2008 roundup

Just a brief update…

Done a bit of work since the last post, fixing up as many blockers as possible running the spec test; Current status is available on the wiki. Short version: 2182 passing tests.

Eliminated some unused code, added minor cleanups and a bit of new functionality still hidden by the aforementioned blockers. Got partcl working with parrot 0.8.0, and then rapidly depending on a newer svn revision. Convinced Matt Diephouse to write some code (yay!), got a patch from julian notfound to fix the build using C++, and some documentation updates from Jerry Gay.

partcl, while not taking advantage of the Parrot Compiler Toolkit (PCT), still uses the Parser Grammar Engine (PGE) heavily† - looks like a recent Hague grant to Patrick Michaud from The Perl Foundation will provide some speedups to PGE, which in turn can only make us go faster. 

† You can see this by using the -t4 option to parrot (trace subroutines) and running any small tcl program, even ../../parrot -t4 tcl.pbc -e "puts hi"  and sorting through the output.