Monday, March 22, 2010

I'm back!

With the completion of Kakapo release-10 a while back, I've been focusing on compiler work again. I have to say, Kakapo is making it smooth.

The change to NQP-rx is causing all kinds of problems. Some of them are voluntary: I'm moving to attribute based classes, and I'm taking advantage of a bunch of features of the new -rx engine. But some of them are involuntary, like climbing the learning curve for how optable parsing works.

I put up a wiki page about that over on the Parrot.org trac site, but even after writing out a bunch of stuff, it's still not totally obvious to me how some parts work. That's part of the learning process, I guess.

One thing I'm doing somewhat differently now is testing. Before, I was writing tests for the compiler. Now I'm writing tests of the compiler.