Yak Shaving Cream

Hello! My name is Elli Peacock and I have spent the past three months working on a GSoC project to enable the creation of single file, self contained executables for Perl 6. If you would like to look at the code for my contributions, you can check them out on the  self-contained-executable branch of NQP.   As the summer comes to an end, I thought it would be appropriate at this point to summarize what I have accomplished so far, and what additional capabilities I would like to add in the future. There were four major phases to this project: generating ELF files (May/June), handling bytecode directly (July), adding the --compile capabilities to NQP (July), and enabling the use of modules (August). In this post, I will start with the original premise of my project, go over the highlights from the four major phases of work, and then discuss what improvements that would be nice to make in the future. I will also touch on my general experience in the GSoC and my experience working with t

Hello! I am a CS student working on a GSoC proof of concept to modify perl6 to create executable binaries. This blog documents my journey and struggles. There are likely more correct and maintainable ways to do what I've done so far. If you know a better way, or if you see an inaccuracy, please let me know in the comments section. This post has been incoming for a while, and as a result, has grown to a massive size. To make it a bit easier to digest, and more useful for those of you reading this hoping to find information about a particular aspect on module loading, I have chopped this post up into multiple smaller posts focusing on each of the smaller aspects. In this particular post, I'm going to focus on how module loading works. What's a module? For a complete explanation of modules, please refer to the Perl 6 documentation . This tutorial is a short and sweet explanation of modules, and this one is a bit more in depth, so pick your poison :). In brief sum

Hello! I am a CS student working on a GSoC proof of concept to modify perl6 to create executable binaries. This blog documents my journey and struggles. There are likely more correct and maintainable ways to do what I've done so far. If you know a better way, or if you see an inaccuracy, please let me know in the comments section. This post has been incoming for a while, and as a result, has grown to a massive size. To make it a bit easier to digest, and more useful for those of you reading this hoping to find information about a particular aspect on module loading, I have chopped this post up into multiple smaller posts focusing on each of the smaller aspects. In this particular post, I'm going to focus on how the dependencies required by your Perl 6 program are identified and how the dependency tree works. Identifying the dependencies An interesting feature I was accidentally triggering when running perl6 --compile=foo foo.pl6  gave me a bit of a head start in figurin