Rakudo Roadmap -------------- Last updated: 2012-12-28 This document serves as a guide to the major goals for Rakudo development, as things stood in December 2011. They have been roughly categorized. Each has been given a 1-3 priority indicator, where 1 is "fairly pressing", 2 is "desirable", and 3 is "wanted, but not a key goal right now". Each item also has from one to five asterisks indicating the estimated "degree of effort" required for the item. A lower priority does not mean, "don't work on this". If you want to hack on a priority 3 item, go right ahead. It is, after all, wanted. And things that are priority 3 now will eventually work their way up to the top anyway. Mostly, -Ofun. Some items are marked with the names of people likely to either work on them OR serve as a "contact person" for the goal. Again, don't let a name already being against a goal stop you working on it - though it would be wise that you check where the marked person is at with it to avoid any duplicated effort, or to pick up hints about how to jump in. :-) Patches to this document are welcome - to add missing goals, remove completed ones, re-prioritize, volunteer for a goal, rescue yourself from a goal, etc. Compiler Performance/Portability Improvements (jnthn) 2 ** finish up any remaining s/pir::/nqp::/ 2 ? re-organize Rakudo, build process, etc. for multi-backend 3 ** Optimizing multis for `[+] 1..10` and `[<=] 1..10` etc. Macros (masak) 2 ** hygienic macros and the COMPILING:: pseudopackage 2 **** "delayed" declarations of routines and types within quasiquotes 3 ? Textual macros Operators 2 *** missing native operators, including ++/-- (jnthn) 3 ** logical cascades Regexes 2 ** ~~ inside regexes 2 * Null pattern detection (at parse time) 2 * :sigspace ignores leading whitespace 2 ** ? quantifier produces Nil or Match, not List[Match] 3 ** <*foo> 3 ** <~~0>, <~~foo> 3 *** explicit backtracking control (::, :::) 3 ** <cut> and <commit> Built-ins/Data Structures 2 *** throwing typed exceptions (moritz) 2 *** packed arrays (jnthn) 2 ***** NFG strings, .codes, .graphs, etc. 2 ** Rat/FatRat/Rational cleanup 2 *** other S02 data types -- KeySet, KeyBag (tadzik) 2 ** sized/shaped arrays (jnthn) 2 *** val() (japhb) 2 ** Correct type smiley support (:U, :D, :T, etc.) (jnthn) 3 *** arrays with custom keys 3 *** complete Buf implementation 3 *** complete LoL and slice context implementation 3 *** Cat and stream matching Language Features 1 *** basic Perl 5 interop (use, eval, etc.) 2 * $=DATA and friends (tadzik) 2 ** module versioning 2 ** missing bits of enums 2 *** new syntax/semantics for coercion (jnthn) 2 ** MAIN and USAGE (japhb) 2 ** Failure changes (japhb) 2 *** coercion types 2 * tr/// 2 ** 'no strict;' 3 *** domain specific languages -- slang and grammar tweaks 3 **** more advanced Perl 5 interop (lexical embedding, etc.) 3 ? Parse and execute simple Perl 5 code Optimizer (jnthn) 2 ** ro/rw variable tracking, related transforms 2 ** context/non-context variable tracking 2 *** :D/:U constraint tracking and integration with dispatch analysis 2 * topic preservation elimination on simple block inlines 2 *** inlining calls to methods 3 *** guard lifting for method call inlining STD Convergence (needs more exploration) 2 ** more of STDs TTIAR error handling Other things (to be organized into above groups) 3 ? AUTOLOAD, including possibly AUTOLOADING setting components
