Week 1 of the Summer of Code has just ended, this week the DecNum PMC advanced some more on the road to completion. It now has most of the VTABLEs implemented by the parrot BigNum and should be usable when mixed with Integers, Numbers, and any other PMC with a get_number() VTABLE.
The catch is that while the functionality is there, we have no tests to make sure that it stays there. Some work is already done here, the t/ directory already contains a test harness and the decNumber library ships with an extensive test-suite. What remains is integration work, making the decNumber tests play nice with our infrastructure.
My plan is to convert the decNumber tests (imported into the t/data directory) into runnable pir. This could be done in a number of ways, but I want to use this opportunity to get to know other parts of parrot, so I decided to implement it in with PCT. I'm reading the docs and it looks very promising, while it's more geared towards writing compilers targeting parrot it has enough flexibility to produce preprocessors without too much fuss. We'll see how the experiment turns out soon enough.