GSoC 2014 - Report 3

Hey everyone!

There is a lot of good news to share this week! Our GSoC task #1 (https://github.com/parrot/parrot/issues/1069) is a success!! :D

So, I have been spending a lot of time looking into and fixing 95 pmc files with a calculated number of 2230 methods for core PMCs alone...

(Please take a look at docs/pmc.pod to understand how annotating methods with :manual_wb, :no_wb and RETURN(decl var) helped us with the WBs for our PMCs.)

But, we hit a blocker when our tests failed and we realized that one WB was missing and we could not figure out which one! I went on to check these files almost twice more without finding the culprit but in the bargain fixing many others :) ...

Finally, rurban developed some extremely helpful diagnostics and we eventually fixed this misbehaving PMC, ResizableIntegerArray.set_integer_native.

And tada -- All tests passed and the build was successful for our branch!

We are now getting a speed improvement between 2.5% - 5% and our branch looks really good for merging, in our 6.5.0 release next week!

In the meanwhile, I have taken the task of finding those hidden WBs that are not really needed and will help boost the speed significantly when removed!! :)

That's all folks! :)