PAST Optimization: plans for the final weeks of GSoC

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.
  2. Take the NQP-rx optimizations I've worked on so far and extract them into a module so that they can easily be added to any HLL.
  3. Expand those optimizations and add more until the "soft 'pencils down'" date Monday.
  4. Spend the remaining week improving documentation and testing.

I welcome suggestions for simple, useful optimizations to implement.

At some point, I also plan to switch the use-pass-manager branch of PIRATE to use :recursive/:when and :combine.

That's all for now. Happy hacking!