Perl 5 Porters Weekly: June 3-9, 2013
Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic of the perl5-porters email list.
Topics this week include:
- DAVEM TPF Grant May 2013 report
- dtrace sub-entry probe against lexical sub segfaults
- COW and THINKFIRST and related safety
DAVEM TPF Grant May 2013 report
Dave Mitchell posted his monthly summary of the work he's done on the Perl core.
This month was mostly spent on removing global state from the regex engine, making re-entrantcy less error-prone. The extract from the merge commit description below gives you all the details you could ever want.
Apart from that I spent a few hours re-enabling Copy-on-Write by default post the 5.18.0 release, plus a few other bits and pieces.
It turns out that I have finally used up all the hours on my grant plus extensions. I really must get round to applying for a new grant sometime soon!
dtrace sub-entry probe against lexical sub segfaults
During my talk about DTrace at YAPC::NA this past week, Ricardo Signes found and filed a bug against the lexical subroutine changes in blead with respect to the Perl sub-entry DTrace probe.
There's a patch for the segfault, but the unit test appears broken.
COW and THINKFIRST and related safety
RJBS wanted to point out some messages from Dave Mitchell about the safe way to deal with strings in the C/XS layer of Perl which became tricksier with the introduction of Copy-on-Write.
Weekly p5p summaries