OSCON 2011 - Perl 5.16 and beyond
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The document discusses plans for future versions of Perl 5. Key points include: - Perl 5 releases now happen much more frequently due to streamlined processes and rotating release engineers. - Backward compatibility is a priority, but the language must continue evolving. A proposal to declare expected Perl versions would allow new features while maintaining old semantics for older code. - Major changes that break backward compatibility would only happen as a last resort, with long deprecation cycles. - Cleaning up and slimming down the Perl core language is a goal to make it more manageable and easier to learn.
OSCON 2011 - Perl 5.16 and beyond
- 1. Perl 5.16 and Beyond Friday, July 29, 11
- 2. Jesse Vincent Friday, July 29, 11
- 4. Former Perl 6 Project Manager Friday, July 29, 11
- 5. What's a Pumpking? Friday, July 29, 11
- 6. BDFL Friday, July 29, 11
- 7. BDFL Friday, July 29, 11
- 8. BDFL Friday, July 29, 11
- 9. I make decisions Friday, July 29, 11
- 10. I¡¯m a manager Friday, July 29, 11
- 11. I don¡¯t do ¡°real work¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 12. So, who makes Perl? Friday, July 29, 11
- 13. Many awesome people Friday, July 29, 11
- 14. I just stand around looking pretty... Friday, July 29, 11
- 15. ...while other people do awesome stuff Friday, July 29, 11
- 16. Is your name in Perl¡¯s AUTHORS ?le? Friday, July 29, 11
- 17. Are you a CPAN author? Friday, July 29, 11
- 18. You rock Friday, July 29, 11
- 19. You make Perl Friday, July 29, 11
- 20. The Release Process Friday, July 29, 11
- 21. Releases in the last 12-or-so months: Friday, July 29, 11
- 22. 5.12.2 Friday, July 29, 11
- 23. 5.12.3 Friday, July 29, 11
- 24. 5.12.4 Friday, July 29, 11
- 25. 5.13.2 Friday, July 29, 11
- 26. 5.13.3 Friday, July 29, 11
- 27. 5.13.4 Friday, July 29, 11
- 28. 5.13.5 Friday, July 29, 11
- 29. 5.13.6 Friday, July 29, 11
- 30. 5.13.7 Friday, July 29, 11
- 31. 5.13.8 Friday, July 29, 11
- 32. 5.13.9 Friday, July 29, 11
- 33. 5.13.10 Friday, July 29, 11
- 34. 5.13.11 Friday, July 29, 11
- 35. 5.14.0 Friday, July 29, 11
- 36. 5.14.1 Friday, July 29, 11
- 37. 5.15.0 Friday, July 29, 11
- 38. 5.15.1 Friday, July 29, 11
- 39. Perl 5.14.1 is the current release of Perl 5 Friday, July 29, 11
- 40. It came out 6ish weeks ago Friday, July 29, 11
- 41. As did Perl 5.12.4 Friday, July 29, 11
- 42. As did Perl 5.15.0 Friday, July 29, 11
- 43. It used to take us 3 weeks to prepare a release Friday, July 29, 11
- 44. And we made the Pumpking do it Friday, July 29, 11
- 45. Now it takes less than a day Friday, July 29, 11
- 46. The 43 step process is documented Friday, July 29, 11
- 47. Releases are still a chore if you do them every month Friday, July 29, 11
- 48. Now we have rotating release engineers Friday, July 29, 11
- 49. Most of them are new committers Friday, July 29, 11
- 50. Nice side effect: release engineers need commit bits Friday, July 29, 11
- 51. Since the move to git, we¡¯ve nearly doubled our committer list Friday, July 29, 11
- 52. The world hasn¡¯t ended Friday, July 29, 11
- 53. Some of those release engineers have become proli?c contributors Friday, July 29, 11
- 54. I just make decisions Friday, July 29, 11
- 55. I try to get them right Friday, July 29, 11
- 56. Sometimes they¡¯re wrong Friday, July 29, 11
- 57. I have a little bit of cover Friday, July 29, 11
- 58. Rule 1 Friday, July 29, 11
- 59. Larry is always right Friday, July 29, 11
- 60. Rule 2 Friday, July 29, 11
- 61. Larry is allowed to change his mind Friday, July 29, 11
- 62. I¡¯m not Larry Friday, July 29, 11
- 63. I¡¯m nowhere near as clever Friday, July 29, 11
- 64. My shirts are nowhere near as loud Friday, July 29, 11
- 65. At YAPC::NA, Larry said that the time of hero-pumpkings is over Friday, July 29, 11
- 66. D Friday, July 29, 11
- 67. Dictator Friday, July 29, 11
- 68. Delegator Friday, July 29, 11
- 69. Documenter Friday, July 29, 11
- 70. Thankfully, Larry¡¯s rules set me up to succeed Friday, July 29, 11
- 71. Rule 1 de?nitely doesn¡¯t apply to the Perl 5 runtime Friday, July 29, 11
- 72. However Friday, July 29, 11
- 73. The core needs more support for Rule 2 Friday, July 29, 11
- 74. I haven¡¯t heard this in a while: Friday, July 29, 11
- 75. Perl is Dead! Friday, July 29, 11
- 76. What I¡¯ve been hearing lately: Friday, July 29, 11
- 77. Where are we going? Friday, July 29, 11
- 78. It¡¯s changing too fast. Can you slow down? Friday, July 29, 11
- 79. You made regexes crazier?$#@!? Friday, July 29, 11
- 80. smartmatch isn¡¯t named correctly... Friday, July 29, 11
- 81. ...can we rename it to psychoticmatch? Friday, July 29, 11
- 82. The future Friday, July 29, 11
- 83. I¡¯ve been accused of lacking a vision for Perl Friday, July 29, 11
- 84. What I lack is a ?ame-proof suit. Friday, July 29, 11
- 85. If I¡¯d talked about my vision 2 years ago... Friday, July 29, 11
- 86. You would have laughed at me Friday, July 29, 11
- 87. ...now that we can do do releases... Friday, July 29, 11
- 88. A Vision Friday, July 29, 11
- 89. New versions of Perl shouldn¡¯t break your existing software Friday, July 29, 11
- 90. Old syntax and semantics can¡¯t stop Perl 5 from evolving Friday, July 29, 11
- 91. We need to be able to make mistakes as we rebuild Perl 5 Friday, July 29, 11
- 92. We will make mistakes as we rebuild Perl 5 Friday, July 29, 11
- 94. We have made mistakes as we¡¯ve rebuilt Perl Friday, July 29, 11
- 95. We need to be able to recover from mistakes as we rebuild Perl Friday, July 29, 11
- 96. The runtime footprint is too big and must be slimmed down Friday, July 29, 11
- 97. Perl should have sane defaults Friday, July 29, 11
- 98. It should be possible to build more of Perl in Perl Friday, July 29, 11
- 99. Perl should run everywhere Friday, July 29, 11
- 100. Not just on every kind of hardware Friday, July 29, 11
- 101. or every OS Friday, July 29, 11
- 102. Every VM Friday, July 29, 11
- 103. Every Browser Friday, July 29, 11
- 104. Every Phone Friday, July 29, 11
- 105. How do we get there? Friday, July 29, 11
- 106. New versions of Perl shouldn¡¯t break existing software Friday, July 29, 11
- 107. Old syntax and semantics must not stop Perl 5 from evolving Friday, July 29, 11
- 108. When your code runs, you have no idea what semantics it¡¯ll see Friday, July 29, 11
- 109. You need to jump through defensive hoops. Friday, July 29, 11
- 110. Lots of defensive hoops Friday, July 29, 11
- 111. use v5.14; Friday, July 29, 11
- 112. ¡°Can I have a Perl that¡¯s 5.14 or newer?¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 113. ¡°Anything newer than 5.14.0 would be great!¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 114. ¡°Ok. I¡¯m 5.30. Have fun!¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 115. That¡¯s not useful Friday, July 29, 11
- 116. It needs to change Friday, July 29, 11
- 117. Declare the version of Perl 5 you expect Friday, July 29, 11
- 118. use v5.16; Friday, July 29, 11
- 119. ¡°I want a Perl that works like 5.16¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 120. The runtime should honor that request Friday, July 29, 11
- 121. Perl should give you semantics as close as possible to what you request Friday, July 29, 11
- 122. New features should not work under ¡®use v5.$older;¡¯ Friday, July 29, 11
- 123. It¡¯s critical that we be able to evolve Friday, July 29, 11
- 124. We need an escape hatch Friday, July 29, 11
- 125. We don¡¯t have one Friday, July 29, 11
- 126. We need Rule 2 Friday, July 29, 11
- 127. Changes to syntax or semantics break existing code Friday, July 29, 11
- 128. Why? Friday, July 29, 11
- 129. They con?ict with existing syntax Friday, July 29, 11
- 130. They change the meaning of existing semantics Friday, July 29, 11
- 131. They con?ict with things users do Friday, July 29, 11
- 132. What do we do? Friday, July 29, 11
- 133. If you declare an old version, you get old syntax and semantics Friday, July 29, 11
- 134. ...at least to the best of our abilities Friday, July 29, 11
- 135. Perfection isn¡¯t possible Friday, July 29, 11
- 136. We can get far closer than we do now Friday, July 29, 11
- 137. Breaking existing code should be a last resort Friday, July 29, 11
- 138. We will break backward compatibility in limited circumstances Friday, July 29, 11
- 139. Some craziness can¡¯t be ?xed in an ¡°optional¡± or lexical way Friday, July 29, 11
- 140. This is going to be hard work Friday, July 29, 11
- 141. A lot of hard work Friday, July 29, 11
- 142. It¡¯s not impossible Friday, July 29, 11
- 143. I have proof Friday, July 29, 11
- 144. Deprecation Friday, July 29, 11
- 145. Our current deprecation cycle is 1 year Friday, July 29, 11
- 146. ¡°It warns in 5.16.0¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 147. ¡°It¡¯s gone in 5.18.0¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 148. That¡¯s turning out to be too short Friday, July 29, 11
- 149. Very few operating systems release that frequently Friday, July 29, 11
- 150. ¡°Declare by default¡± means we can make some changes sooner Friday, July 29, 11
- 151. If it still works in old code, we can change it with no deprecation cycle Friday, July 29, 11
- 152. Some old misfeatures need to come out lest they block signi?cant improvements Friday, July 29, 11
- 153. If we can¡¯t emulate the old feature for old code, we need a longer deprecation cycle Friday, July 29, 11
- 154. ¡°It dies in code that declares ¡®use v5.16¡¯¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 155. ¡°It warns in older code on 5.16.0¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 156. ¡°It still warns in old code on 5.18.0¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 157. ¡°It¡¯s gone in 5.20.0¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 158. Old Modules Friday, July 29, 11
- 159. We haven¡¯t just been deprecating and yanking broken old features Friday, July 29, 11
- 160. We¡¯ve been doing the same to old modules Friday, July 29, 11
- 161. They all end up on CPAN Friday, July 29, 11
- 162. This has started to hurt users who wrote code with ¡°no non-core deps¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 163. We need to make it easier to ship two ?avors of Perl 5 Friday, July 29, 11
- 164. Hotel California Friday, July 29, 11
- 165. aka Traditional Perl Friday, July 29, 11
- 166. The Times,They Are A-Changin¡¯ Friday, July 29, 11
- 167. aka Bootstrappable Perl Friday, July 29, 11
- 168. There¡¯s work going on to make this easier Friday, July 29, 11
- 169. Cleaning up the language Friday, July 29, 11
- 170. The runtime footprint is too big and must be slimmed down Friday, July 29, 11
- 171. One of the points of doing this is to clean up the core Friday, July 29, 11
- 172. How does this clean up the core? Friday, July 29, 11
- 173. Perl is a big language Friday, July 29, 11
- 174. There are bigger languages Friday, July 29, 11
- 175. It's harder to manage a big language Friday, July 29, 11
- 176. It¡¯s harder to learn a big language Friday, July 29, 11
- 177. It¡¯s harder to ?x bugs in a big language Friday, July 29, 11
- 178. We¡¯re ok, but not amazing at core language dev Friday, July 29, 11
- 179. As a community, we¡¯re awesome at modules Friday, July 29, 11
- 180. How do we make Perl a smaller language? Friday, July 29, 11
- 181. It¡¯s possible to load modules that inject new builtins Friday, July 29, 11
- 182. It¡¯s possible to load modules that inject old builtins Friday, July 29, 11
- 183. Time to start... Friday, July 29, 11
- 184. ...refactoring Friday, July 29, 11
- 185. Lots of stuff in perl isn't necessarily part of Perl 5 the Language Friday, July 29, 11
- 186. This stuff is part of Perl 5 the chainsaw Friday, July 29, 11
- 187. I like our chainsaw Friday, July 29, 11
- 188. I¡¯m not talking about deprecating this stuff Friday, July 29, 11
- 189. ...just about decoupling it Friday, July 29, 11
- 190. SysV IPC functions Friday, July 29, 11
- 191. Socket IO functions Friday, July 29, 11
- 192. Unix user & group information functions Friday, July 29, 11
- 193. Unix network information functions Friday, July 29, 11
- 194. Process and process group functions Friday, July 29, 11
- 195. Formats Friday, July 29, 11
- 196. smartmatch Friday, July 29, 11
- 197. ...and probably a bunch of other stuff Friday, July 29, 11
- 198. That bit about ¡°forcing a version declaration¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 199. If you don¡¯t, you¡¯ll get whatever was in 5.14. Friday, July 29, 11
- 200. The implementation of SysV might be a module Friday, July 29, 11
- 201. As a developer writing code in Perl 5, you won¡¯t need to care Friday, July 29, 11
- 202. ..and shouldn¡¯t be able to tell Friday, July 29, 11
- 203. In the future we might ?x a bug or two in the modularized code Friday, July 29, 11
- 204. You could take the update without having to upgrade all of Perl 5 Friday, July 29, 11
- 205. Someday we might remove things from the default runtime Friday, July 29, 11
- 206. Every feature we externalize reclaims precious memory Friday, July 29, 11
- 207. Every feature we externalize reclaims precious sanity Friday, July 29, 11
- 208. That just means you¡¯ll need to declare you want an older feature Friday, July 29, 11
- 209. ...but only if you ask for v5.16 Friday, July 29, 11
- 210. ...but only if you ask for v5.18 Friday, July 29, 11
- 211. ...but only if you ask for v5.20 Friday, July 29, 11
- 212. Existing code won¡¯t break Friday, July 29, 11
- 213. There are many, many unanswered questions Friday, July 29, 11
- 214. But it¡¯s doable Friday, July 29, 11
- 215. I have proof! Friday, July 29, 11
- 216. Case study: Smartmatch Friday, July 29, 11
- 217. After YAPC::NA rjbs (and others) raised the issue of smartmatch Friday, July 29, 11
- 218. Perl has a history of theft from other languages Friday, July 29, 11
- 219. Perl has a history of borrowing from other languages Friday, July 29, 11
- 220. We stole smartmatch from Perl 6 Friday, July 29, 11
- 221. It¡¯s very clever Friday, July 29, 11
- 222. It¡¯s nearly impossible to explain Friday, July 29, 11
- 223. It¡¯s nearly impossible to understand Friday, July 29, 11
- 224. RJBS (the previous speaker) proposed a saner, much less clever, smart match Friday, July 29, 11
- 225. I don¡¯t want to break existing code that uses smartmatch Friday, July 29, 11
- 226. Jesse Luehrs (DOY) was sitting in the back of my YAPC talk Friday, July 29, 11
- 227. He... Friday, July 29, 11
- 228. ...threw himself at the problem Friday, July 29, 11
- 229. He extracted smartmatch into an XS module Friday, July 29, 11
- 230. He reimplemented it entirely in pure perl Friday, July 29, 11
- 231. It¡¯s slower, but it¡¯s understandable and hackable Friday, July 29, 11
- 232. He implemented Ricardo¡¯s saner smart match as an alternative Friday, July 29, 11
- 233. I¡¯m hoping that 5.16 ships DOY¡¯s smartmatch implementations Friday, July 29, 11
- 234. 'use v5.16;' should load the new one in your scope Friday, July 29, 11
- 235. 'use v5.14;' should load the old one in your scope Friday, July 29, 11
- 236. no ¡°use v5.x;¡± line should load the old one in your scope. Friday, July 29, 11
- 237. We need a module hierarchy for such things in core Friday, July 29, 11
- 238. The Test Suite Friday, July 29, 11
- 239. (Keeping us honest) Friday, July 29, 11
- 240. We have an amazing test suite Friday, July 29, 11
- 241. Over time, we need to tease apart (at least) 3 kinds of tests Friday, July 29, 11
- 242. Language tests Friday, July 29, 11
- 243. Bug-?x tests Friday, July 29, 11
- 244. Implementation tests Friday, July 29, 11
- 245. To hold us to the compatibility promises we make, we need a new test harness Friday, July 29, 11
- 246. ¡°Run the test suites we shipped with previous releases...¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 247. ...all of em Friday, July 29, 11
- 248. We've been moving pretty fast Friday, July 29, 11
- 249. We¡¯ve done some things I... Friday, July 29, 11
- 250. ...wouldn¡¯t do again Friday, July 29, 11
- 251. I¡¯m going to be a lot more skeptical about new features Friday, July 29, 11
- 252. ...at least ones that don¡¯t make it easier to have fewer features Friday, July 29, 11
- 253. We should have sane defaults Friday, July 29, 11
- 254. There¡¯s lots of crazy in Perl 5 Friday, July 29, 11
- 255. Syntactic Crazy Friday, July 29, 11
- 256. Semantic Crazy Friday, July 29, 11
- 257. Internal Crazy Friday, July 29, 11
- 258. Module Crazy Friday, July 29, 11
- 259. It may be time to consider doing away with some of that Friday, July 29, 11
- 260. But ONLY if you declare ¡°use v5.16¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 261. But ONLY if you declare ¡°use v5.18¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 262. But ONLY if you declare ¡°use v5.20¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 263. We¡¯ve started down this road Friday, July 29, 11
- 264. ¡°use v5.12¡± includes ¡°use strict;¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 265. Where do we go next? Friday, July 29, 11
- 266. warnings on by default Friday, July 29, 11
- 267. autodie-esque defaults Friday, July 29, 11
- 268. autodie does good for your code Friday, July 29, 11
- 269. using deep, scary evil Friday, July 29, 11
- 270. I will not show you the evil Friday, July 29, 11
- 271. Ask Paul Fenwick Friday, July 29, 11
- 272. The guy with the accent Friday, July 29, 11
- 273. In the hat Friday, July 29, 11
- 274. We should throw exceptions rather than just return on failure Friday, July 29, 11
- 275. I don¡¯t want us to bikeshed an exception hierarchy Friday, July 29, 11
- 276. Heck, I¡¯d be happy if we started with dying with well-de?ned strings Friday, July 29, 11
- 277. (I¡¯d love an exception hierarchy) Friday, July 29, 11
- 278. 2-arg open() gone by default Friday, July 29, 11
- 279. 1-arg open() gone by default? Friday, July 29, 11
- 280. Latin-1 autopromote off by default Friday, July 29, 11
- 281. utf-8 everything by default Friday, July 29, 11
- 282. A clean, simple meta-model with basic classes and methods Friday, July 29, 11
- 283. No indirect object syntax by default Friday, July 29, 11
- 284. But only if you declare ¡°use v5.16¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 285. But only if you declare ¡°use v5.18¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 286. But only if you declare ¡°use v5.20¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 287. So, Why? Friday, July 29, 11
- 288. Perl needs to be cleaner, simpler and easier to work with Friday, July 29, 11
- 289. For users... Friday, July 29, 11
- 290. ...and for implementers Friday, July 29, 11
- 291. Perl should run everywhere Friday, July 29, 11
- 292. Why isn¡¯t Perl 5 on other Runtimes? Friday, July 29, 11
- 293. ¡°There¡¯s no spec¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 294. That didn¡¯t stop Ruby Friday, July 29, 11
- 295. ¡°Only Perl 5 can parse Perl 5¡± Friday, July 29, 11
- 296. That didn't stop PPI Friday, July 29, 11
- 297. To survive, a desperate hacker needs to be able to reimplement Perl 5 Friday, July 29, 11
- 298. Thanks! Friday, July 29, 11
- 299. How do we make this happen faster? Friday, July 29, 11
- 300. Perl 5 Maint Fund Friday, July 29, 11
- 302. Questions/Tomatoes? http://blog.fsck.com jesse@perl.org @obra Friday, July 29, 11
- 303. About the name Friday, July 29, 11
- 304. Our language is called Perl 5 Friday, July 29, 11
- 305. Perl 6 is our precocious kid sister Friday, July 29, 11
- 306. I¡¯m happy to talk about renaming Perl 5... Friday, July 29, 11
- 307. ...if you write me a second implementation that passes the test suite Friday, July 29, 11