Patches, crashes, hashes and stash caches, these are a few of my favorite things. If you like them, too, this week's P5P summary is for you !
Arthur Bergman has the idea to use a cache to store symbol tables (a.k.a. stashes) for class method calls, to avoid looking them up from the package name each time they're invoked. He proposes a patch, with which he observes an average 180% speed increase (on his system).
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93974.html
Ilya Zakharevich submitted a load of patches to maintperl, some of them related to the Perl port to OS/2, some of them more generic, to MakeMaker, Net::Ping, Time::HiRes. He also posted some comments about the ithread implementation in 5.8.0, and tried to have microperl working. (Look in the perldelta manpage for perl 5.8.0 if you haven't heard about microperl before.)
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93848.html : threads goofs
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93936.html : microperl
And that's not all. He also proposed to add built-in support for the now-standard --help and --version switches to Getopt::Std. This is followed by a discussion with Johan Vromans about extending this feature to Getopt::Long.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93940.html
Alberto Accomazzi reports that perl 5.8.0, compiled with the usemymalloc configuration option, doesn't seem to be able to handle more than 1GB of RAM. This being most probably due to an inner limitation (although nobody commented on this).
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg94022.html
Bug #21765 is about split() not returning the desired kind of false/empty value, when called in a specific assignment context. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes sent a fix. Demonstration here :
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93876.html
Bug #21787 reports a problem with the fields pragma. Michael Schwern says that this looks like a bug which was just reported in Class:Fields, which includes its own version of fields.pm.
Michael Schwern, busy on the MakeMaker front, asked how portable the redirection construct 2&>1 was, when used from inside the qx// operator. Apparently it's portable on platforms that provide a shell that understands it, on OS/2 (that provides an emulation), and on VMS, but only when the external command run by qx// is perl.
Steve Hay provided several fixes to the installhtml utility, that generates the perl standard documentation in HTML format, and that was severely messed up.
Chip Salzenberg wonders, lonely, about the FIXME comments that can be found here and there in the sources.
Sadahiro Tomoyuki released new versions of Unicode::Normalize and Unicode::Collate.
This summary was brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are available on http://use.perl.org/ and/or via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Comments, corrections, additions, and suggestions are welcome. Apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein.