Stevan Little

As I was doing my daily check of blogs.perl.org, I noticed a recent post by Ovid in which he said ...

Of course, we also need the p5-mop, but that hasn't been touched in a while; I hope it's not dead.

... and that reminded me I really needed to write a blog post to update folks on the status of the p5-mop effort, so here goes.

While I did release the 0.03-TRIAL version of p5-MOP at the recent AmsterdamX hackathon, not much actual work has been done on it for about 4 months. There are two reasons for the slowdown.

First, both Jesse and myself have been busy with work (and before that, the holidays) so finding enough time to hack on it has been hard. Of course this is a good problem to have for $work work, but a bad problem for our open source work. Such is the curse of volunteer open source labor, sometimes we need to take a break in order to make a living.

Second, I personally, don't know XS, and Jesse (with the help of Florian "rafl" Ragwitz) ported much of the internals over to XS/C prior to our 0.02 release. This helped speed things up quite a bit and reduced our dependencies down to only one non-core module, Devel::CallParser, which hopefully will make it into core eventually.

But all is not lost, what I have been doing is spending all available cracks of time over the last two months cramming my brain full of C, XS and Perl internals (oh, the horror!). My hope is that when work lightens up for me (hopefully) towards the end of this month, I will be able to dive back in even deeper this time. In the meantime, we are still looking for people to port modules, write tests and generally just bang on it.

So please, be patient, p5-MOP is neither dead or a dead end, it is just taking a little breather while I tend to work and life.