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 worki...

News on the GSOC project! I've been able to get "Hello world!" working! Here are my notes on the process of getting it to this point. Figuring Out the Right Approach On Sunday, I had a discussion on #moarvm with mornfall , nine , and brrt about the path forward I suggested in last week's update. Mornfall pointed out that replacing _start would likely be way more headache than it was worth. They instead suggested using objcopy to convert a text file containing the MBC bytecode into a .o file (also called relocatable ELF file), and then writing a small C program which invokes MoarVM using the bytecode packaged in the .o file. This is essentially the approach I used for my first attempt, with a few tweaks. As pointed out by nine, it currently isn't possible to directly call moar and have it execute MBC. If you try, you'll be greeted with this error message: Nine mentioned  that there is good deal of necessary setup that is done when perl6 is calle...