Perl 6 hackathon at the Swiss Perl Workshop

2 minute read

The third instalment of the Swiss Perl Workshop will take place in the last week of August 2015. Part of the workshop will be a Perl 6 Hackathon, one of the last opportunities to hack on Perl 6 before “Christmas”. I’m really looking forward to the workshop since it’ll be an opportunity to meet people I’ve previously only known through IRC. I also like the smaller size of a workshop compared to that of a conference; it’s somehow easier to get to know other people when you’re one of 60 as opposed to one of 1000. I’ve also heard very good reviews about the Swiss Perl Workshop and its location, so, yeah, I’m eager to see it!

As usual, I plan to do way more than time will likely permit, but I thought I’d share my ideas of things to do at the hackathon anyway.

Perl 6 examples website

The examples and the code which builds the HTML needs a bit of TLC. Not a huge amount to do, but it’d be good to improve the standard of the current set of entries if possible.

Document the NQP build process within Debian for the Debian Rakudo Group

The Debian package maintainers have created powerful tools to cope with the complexities of building Debian packages from upstream sources. These processes need to be documented on the Debian Rakudo Group wiki in order to make things easier for newcomers to get up to speed, and to remind forgetful people like myself the sequence of commands one needs to create a new package.

Squash Coverity issues in MoarVM

Coverity Scan is a free static analysis service for Open Source projects which scans C source code for potential problems generally not picked up by compiler warnings. I’d like to get as many of the issues dealt with as possible before the initial Perl 6 release later this year. With some of the MoarVM devs being at the workshop, maybe I can corner one of them to get some help in fixing some of the trickier issues Coverity shows up.

Perl 6 documentation

The Perl 6 documentation pages are a work in progress and as such also need a bit of TLC. Hopefully I’ll get some time to sit down and simply read some of the docs and improve the wording where possible and maybe also document some of the as yet undocumented language features.

Perl 6 ecosystem checks

Perl 6 has a steadily growing ecosystem of modules. Many of these modules have been around for a while and some use what are now deprecated language features. Since all deprecated language features will be removed in the RC-0 release of Rakudo, it would be good to have most of the modules up to date with current Perl 6 usage at that time.

tl;dr

There’s much to do, however I hope that with some concentrated hacking time I can tick some items off my list. Let’s see how I go!