what TODO next?

Steve Peters asked on IRC if there was anything that someone not that
familiar with the innards of ponie and parrot could do.

According to the roadmap:

  http://svn.perl.org/ponie/trunk/Roadmap

the next task to start is

  =item *

  Currently Ponie is maintaining the Perl 5 reference count inside each PMC's
  data structures.


(It's the next task to start, because it doesn't have any comment about how
complete it is next to its estimated duration)

I think I can see how to do this. However, a task that I can't see a great
way to do is "Migrate the number/string conversion code into the PMC."
It's been minimally done - the official named perl routines now call into
the PMC, but the PMC calls straight back out into the original perl
function bodies. This is because I think that the 4 bodies in question
(sv_2iv, sv_2uv, sv_2nv and sv_2pv) could benefit from some refactoring in
the perl 5 core to remove the duplicated logic and code, and place it in
small static helper functions. So if anyone is feeling inventive, I'd be
very happy if they had a look at those four functions (and the static
functions they already call), and see if they can spot any obvious ways
to de-duplicated common code.

The perl 5 core would benefit from the smaller code size. The perl 5 porters
would benefit from the lowered maintenance burden. And simplifying the code
in perl5 would make it easier to tease the logic of it apart into different
the PMC implementations.

Nicholas Clark

• what TODO next? by Nicholas Clark