As the first of what will be multiple blog posts or posting to parrot-dev about this gathering, I am posting below the agenda I composed:

Agenda for Pacific Northwest Parrot Developers Gathering
Saturday, October 16, 2010
1100-1700
Lucky Labrador Brewing
915 SE Hawthorne Blvd
Portland, OR 97214

Part One, 1100-1300.
Questions for Current Parrot Developers

I'm on vacation in the Pacific Northwest -- a vacation that has Parrot droppings all over it. The high point will be the Saturday, October 16 Pacific Northwest Parrot Developers Gathering I previously blogged about. You are welcome to drop in at Lucky Labrador Brewing, 915 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland OR.

Andrew Whitworth -- the fastest blogger in the East! -- has already blogged about our September 18 meeting in Fairless Hills, PA. He has received several responses to that post, as well as a more complete response from chromatic -- the fastest blogger in the West! whiteknight has responded in turn. Enjoy!

I'd like to go public with an idea I've been developing in discussions with the other recently elected Parrot Foundation Board of Directors and some other Parrot contributors: A one-day gathering of Parrot developers to be held in Portland, Oregon, USA on Saturday, October 16.

This gathering would have three objectives and the division of the day into parts would match those objectives:

1. Enable Parrot developers to meet each other face-to-face, get to know one another better, and start to figure out how each can best contribute to the project.

The Google Summer of Code pencils-down date was last Monday. GSoC is now over, but I don't plan to stop working on my project.

The initial goals listed in my project proposal were:

• A library for PAST traversal.
• A framework for PAST optimization and analysis tools.
• A regular-expression-like pattern matching library for PASTs.
• An optimization to turn tail-calls in PAST into PIR ".tailcall".

I proposed a pretty ambitious Google Summer of Code project this year. Although I didn't manage to do everything I hoped, I did manage to get a useful subset of threading functionality working in the gsoc_threads branch. In this blog post I will describe what I have working and what more needs to be done.

Now that I have the basic green threads (Task) API basically working, it's time to start mixing in OS threads. I plan to do that in two steps: First I'm going to use OS threads to solve the key issue with the green threads implementation - blocking IO. The result of this will be basically equivilent to CPython threads-with-GIL. The second step - real parallel thread execution - will have to wait for after GSoC pencils down.

I spent this last week working on Tree::Optimizer (and getting distracted by Rakudo *).

I've got the functionality described in my blog post last week mostly finished. The only thing remaining is making sure that recursive passes correctly handle nulls, which I'm about to work on.

The Google Summer of Code is almost over. Next Monday is the "suggested 'pencils down'" date. The following Monday is the "firm 'pencils down'" date. After that are final evaluations.

Here's my plan for the remainder of GSoC:

1. Merge the pass-manager branch of my project's repo into master.

I reached the midterms mostly as scheduled, and NFG is pretty much feature complete now. There's still some stuff to do here and there, but the 'big ticket' items are done. So, I have been looking at what needs to be done before the gsoc_nfg branch can be merged back into trunk. And that means giving a hard look at all of the places where I've cut corners and see if they can be made better. It's mostly minor stuff, like leaving out a cast, or not paying attention to const mismatches in a few places. Most of it is just a matter of code cleanup. Until you see the extra pointer I added to string headers.

• Tutorial to learn the basics of the PIR syntax and beginner's introduction to Parrot

NQP - Not Quite Perl

• Example
• wikibook
• Parrot NQP documentation

The target Lorito