I want to talk about what I need to do over the next couple weeks, and in order to do that, I'm going to start with a description of the system I'm working on. This was originally a much longer post, but I accidentally overwrote my first draft with something else. This is probably good since the first one read more like a reference manual.

So, when I was making my schedule, I didn't know about YAPC. But I made plans, grabbed a friend, and went. Met lots of cool people. But I just now got home from a 16 hour drive so both the blog post about YAPC and the blog post about PAST, POST, and newPOST will have to be delayed until after I catch up on some missing sleep.

I've lost more time to the bog that is removing Q:PIR blocks. I keep triggering odd little bugs and only have the most complicated bits left. There are 7 Q:PIR blocks, of which 3 are to handle the multiple return values from post_children(). On bacek's advice, I'm going to just not worry about the last few bits. I'd really like to get rid of them by the end of summer, but at this point it's blocking forward progress.

Also, my pool has a pile of problems. It's green and the pump is broken and and and... I'm sure very few people care, but the repeated trips to the pool store are eating up far more time than I had intended.

My work this week was slightly complicated by pmichaud changing PCT in master. Turns out that tracking changes in a method I already converted is harder than converting it in the first place. However, since NQP and Rakudo are already using the enhancements, I thought it valuable to merge them quickly. I'm mostly done, just hunting down some sneaky bugs.

This has been a bit of an eventful week outside of GSoC. I had another housemate move in, so I'm surrounded by boxes and keep getting asked to move this or fix something around the house. But progress has been made:

June 6 PAST::Node in NQP: Conversion of PAST::Node and it's seven subclasses into full NQP code.

Today will be very brief. I'm a bit tired as my holiday weekend was very busy.

May 30 PAST NQP Framework: Convert PAST into NQP-based files via Q:PIR constructs. This will involve splitting Node.pir into separate files for each class, providing a NQP structure for each sub and updating the build framework.

As I noted a while back, I did this in the first couple of days of work. I'm now into the process of hunting down Q:PIR blocks and replacing them with NQP (using pir:: where needed).

Wait, why are you running already?

May 24 GSoC Start Date

Technically, the Summer of Code starts today. But since school was finished last week, I started digging in early. My blog last Friday had a few mini-goals in it:

• Examine current state of nqp_pct: Bacek's work here is contained in the compilers/pct/src/POST directory. The format and design of these classes are in large part what I'm basing my new work on.

But it's not out forever. Alice Cooper lied to me. However, with my final final behind me I can now begin to dig into Parrot code!

One of the requirements for Summer of Code is a weekly blog posting. For future weeks, I intend to post on Monday or Tuesday so that my post is ready prior to #parrotsketch. Although GSoC has yet to officially begin, I thought I'd create a "week 0" post to work out a format for them and discuss my plans in general. I thought I'd start each post with the stated deadline from my proposal:

My name is Brian Gernhardt and I'm a Google Summer of Code student. My project is Migrating PAST to NQP and newPOST. The full description of my project is there, along with a short biography, but for those who want to skip the nitty gritty details, I'll give a short version here.