Programming, Software and Code

Blocked Tasks and Starting AIO

24 May 2009
legacy  —  Parrot  —  IO
I'm trying to take stock of my task list, and I have surprisingly few things available to do. The list is pretty large (and wasn't even complete, I added a new task this morning), but I am able to work on only a small handful of items right now.
  1. I am adding a new job to my task list: removing the deprecated stacks functions. I added in the deprecation notice in r39144, which means I can't work on this stuff until the 1.5 release in 3 months.
  2. The calling conventions work is all blocking, probably until 1.4 in two months. This is a pretty big issue and getting bigger, because I'm finding all sorts of new items that are related to this that I wasn't aware of previously. Most of the items on my list are blocked because of this.
The IO system is in better condition then I thought when I last looked at it, so it doesn't really require any cleanups, so check that item off my list. Also, yesterday I fixed the problem Coke reported about Objects, so that item is off too. So, what's left on my list that I can do between now and 1.4?
  1. Create the incremental GC
  2. The Asynchronous IO system
  3. Documentation (especially the book)
I do some idle writing on the book every now and again, but that hardly scratches my "need to code" itch. Plus, it's scheduled to go to the printer within the month, which leaves me with only two tasklist items to work on post-1.3.

So basically I have the incremental GC and the AIO systems to work on for now. Since I'm not ready yet to do the GC, I've started the AIO work this morning and have already started implementing some of the necessary PMC types. This branch isn't going to make any changes anywhere else in the code base, it will only add prototypes of new PMC types that can be added to trunk without breaking anything. Once these things are implemented, I will open new branches to start integrating them into Parrot. I'm leaving notes throughout to keep track of what the integration will require. There are also obviously still a few open questions to answer, and I'm hoping that these will get resolved as I start implementing things.

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