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A collection of tools and building blocks for the Parrot Virtual Machine.
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Future Libraries

Overview

Rosella is a large collection of libraries. At any given time there will be some libraries in the collection considered “stable” and “usable”, and other libraries in the collection which are still in the planning or development stages.

This webpage is going to list some of the libraries which are in planning and development stages. As these libraries grow and mature, they will become stable and will be listed elsewhere in the documentation.

If you are interested in either using or helping to bring them to maturity, let me know. I’m always interested in new ideas, feedback, and contributions.

How To Become Stable

To be listed as a stable library, a Rosella library must have:

  1. Ample in-code documentation and comments
  2. A webpage describing the capabilities and usages of the library
  3. Significant test coverage

The library should also be well-designed, have a good and maintainable architecture, be extendable and configurable, and follow all coding standards.

Development Libraries

These libraries exist, but are either incomplete, not tested, not documented, have bad interfaces, suffer from bad or incomplete design, or are otherwise not mature enough to be considered a stable part of Rosella.

Assert

A library for performing runtime checks and assertions. The Assert library implements functionality to verify that certain values hold in certain ranges, that objects implement required interfaces, and that functions are both being called correctly and returning correct values. At runtime, the Assert library can be “turned off”, and will not perform any costly checks. The Assert library can be integrated with the Test library to add more tools for unit and integration testing.

Benchmark

The Benchmark library will contain tools and utilities for benchmarking and measuring the performance of code.

Decorate

Based on the Proxy library, the Decorate library provides a mechanism for creating cheap Decorators. A Decorator is an object which adds new attributes and methods to an object of an existing class, without violating encapsulation.

Dumper

A replacement for the Data::Dumper that ships with Parrot, Rosella Dumper is a full-featured tool for providing a text representation of a complex nested object for human readability. It is not a general-purpose serialization library. Dumper is fully configurable, and the way dumping occurs can be controlled through subclassing and other configurability options.

Lazy

The Lazy library implements lazy objects. Lazy objects are proxies which take a target type but which only instantiate the targe object on demand. This is useful for when you need to have and pass an object “instance”, but creating the object is too expensive to do eagerly.

Prototype

The Prototype library implements the Prototype pattern. A Prototype is an object which is cloned to create new objects, as opposed to a normal system of object creation where objects are allocated fresh and separate initialized. The Prototype library allows you to register both a prototype object and an initializer method for each type, then ask for objects of that type by name.

Reflect

The Reflect library provides a familiar and powerful interface for doing runtime type reflection.

Utilities

Not a library, several standalone utility programs are being developed as part of the Rosella package. These utility programs will use Rosella libraries to perform several important and time-saving tasks.

Planned Libraries

These are libaries which exist only on paper (or, more likely, only in my head). These are just rough plans for things I might like to work on, but haven’t actually written any code for.

MVC

This library will provide a number of helper utilities to support systems using an MVC architecture.

Multicast

This library will provide higher-order routines for combining functions together in logical ways to be executed as a single unit.

Commandline

This library will provide tools for working with the commandline, including commandline argument parsing, spawning and managing processes, and doing other similar tasks.