GSoc progress report

All tests in nqp/t/nqp with the exception of test 49 are passing.

Test 49 among other things requires compiling regexes at runtime.

Example:
my $regex := "a+";
"aaaaa" ~~ /<$regex>/;

This is easy to do after bootstraping (when we have the whole compiler avaliable at runtime) or a bunch of crafty hacks.
After attempting to quick hack a workaround (which would involve starting up a new parrot process to cross compile a regex) it turned out our current cross compiling solution won't work. I decided to avoid waisting time on that and leave it to after the boostrap.

t/nqp directory in the nqp repository contains all the tests for the NQP language features.
There are also tests in t/qregex which are really a whole bunch of regex and their expected results on a suplied string.
(in a tab separated format + a harness).
And 3 tests in t/serialization which would involve a boring translation of serialization code from a different backend.

What seems to be a good direction is to get all the tests qast tests (which were written by Jonathan while porting nqp to the jvm) under JavaScript. They test the backend without requiring a parser. Doing that has uncovered a number of bugs in nqp-js. Major things like multi methods seem to work correctly but I have encoutered many small bugs. Which seems to imply that the nqp test suit needs to be more exaustive.
A few examples of those and their fixes:

nqp::null() was tested for truthfullness is some places, we are currently doing that using a .Bool method so I had instead of using a native javascript null switch to using a custom singleton for that.
https://github.com/pmurias/rakudo-js/commit/896e597f1358a3a51d64a955eb4d...

Objects being false by default caused if $slurp {...emit some code for slurp...} not to work
https://github.com/pmurias/rakudo-js/commit/580829d2ea337c57fad19273d232...

\n not being implemented in regexes caused subst(/\n/,"\\n",:global) to loop infinitly:
https://github.com/pmurias/rakudo-js/commit/868b4bdd36cca93287b21e18ebf9...

Currently in nqp-js I'm using JavaScript arrays as nqp arrays (with a bunch of methods monkey patched on top of them).
That caused a problem as JavaScript alread has a push and unshift methods (hinting that it was somewhat inspired by Perl 5).
The tests thus far where using the nqp::push op for adding elements to arrays.
However QAST::Compiler::JavaScript uses the .push method
Example: nqp::push(@foo,$value) vs @foo.push($value).

My current calling convention is that $foo.bar(:a("named"),1) is translated to $foo.bar(ctx,{"a":"named"},1).

Which ended up in strange things being added into arrays (Which resulted in some fun debugging).