Reini Urban

Since it is not possible to write p5p criticism to the mailing list, I'll have to do it in my blog. @p5p: think over your guidelines. I don't believe that stuff like that needs to be blogged.

DaveM now introduced a new OP_SIGNATURE which assigns run-time args according to the compiled signature.

It basically speeds up these compiled checks

    sub f ($a, $b = 0, $c = "foo") {};

=>

    sub f {
        die sprintf("Too many arguments for subroutine at %s line %d.\n", (caller)[1, 2]) unless @_ <= 3;
        die sprintf("Too few arguments for subroutine at %s line %d.\n", (caller)[1, 2]) unless @_ >= 1;
        my $a = $_[0];
        my $b = @_ >= 2 ? $_[1] : 0;
        my $c = @_ >= 3 ? $_[2] : 'foo';
        ();
    }

into one OP, which does the same, similar to the new MULTIDEREF. Moving op chains into C. DaveM is now the goto guy for the big DWIM ops, compressing previous op chains into a single one.

This is far too much for a single op, but previously it was all handled either in ENTERSUB or in user code.

The arity checks should be done in the call op (ENTERSUB), the local assignment should be separate ops, we still have no syntax support for types which could be used previously in user-code (my int $i = $_[0];) and now we even need type hooks. These can also be added after the SIGNATURE op, but make not much sense there, as side effects will appear to early. XS calls do not need the checks as they do by their own, but XS calls are easily detected in ENTERSUB.

The assignment to local lexicals is now buried in this single OP, which makes it's now impossible to change the currently only supported call by value to the faster call by reference. I.e. there's still no support to declare call by ref

sub myinc (\$a) { $a++ }; my $i=0; myinc($i); print $i; # => 1

so you still have to use $_[0] directly, which means @_ still needs to be filled with all args, which makes every signature usage still twice as slow as normal calls without signature declaration. Once for @_ in ENTERSUB and a second time for the named args in SIGNATURE. So this new OP basically just hides this new slowness by design (blame Zefram for this idea) by bypassing the normal ops which assigned the locals.

Any optimizing compiler now needs to replace this new SIGNATURE op and cannot work on the optree. Fine, it cannot be used as is anyway.

Compiled or run-time polymorphism (dispatch on argument types) now needs to replace SIGNATURE and not ENTERSUB. There's not much difference, both are horrible ops to work with. SIGNATURE is probably easier to replace, but replacing ENTERSUB had its advantages by leaving out all the unneeded recursion, @_ and debugger code. So basically you have now to replace both.

Of course there's still no type support, and still no return type declaration syntax, though it seems the post declaration attribute list can now be used, as :const is now supported, just for anonsubs only.

So real subs can soon look like:

sub myinc (int \$a) :int { $a++ }

and you can use the faster i_ops for the result, and since it's a reference, for the lifetime of the caller variable. Just don't expect that from p5p in the next 5 years. Only all the other dynamic languages, python, ruby, php, javascript announce these features officially, and I have to implement it in private.

p5p still has no idea what they are doing, but probably will also announce it as great breakthrough, as they did with the Zefram signatures before. Which is somewhat funny, announcing the worst of all existing signature implementations as positive. People bought that, so it will work now too.

So far the biggest breakthrough lately was besides the new fast METHOD ops (THANKS!), to go for the :const attribute for subs (THANKS!), so the other syntax possibilities => type or perl6 like returns type or is ro are now very unlikely to appear. This was a great decision, even if it was done unconsciously, and I can finally go forward.