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...

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, please let me know in the comments section. I have a couple of updates this week! I've gotten --compile working and have made progress on packaging the code for Modules inside the ELF (though I haven't quite coaxed things into using those packaged modules). Fair warning, this post is going to be a bit long. If you want to hear about the changes I made to NQP , jump to Adding the --compile functionality . If you want to hear about the changes I made to p6_linker , jump down to Altering the p6_linker.  If you want to hear about the progress towards module functionality, jump down to Module troubles. If you just want a brief summary of what I did, jump down to In summary. And as always, if you want to hear about...

Exciting news! I've successfully modified  perl6  to run bytecode! You can look through my changes on Github here . In this post, I'm going to briefly go over what happens when you run perl6 , what I added to get the additional functionality, a few issues I ran into along the way, and what I'm doing next. What does running perl6  do? Let's imagine you are using MoarVM as your backend, Rakudo as your compiler, and have just written the program foo.pl6  and want to run it. You call perl6 foo.pl6.  What happens next? main.nqp begins to execute. This is the very beginning of the initialization process necessary for your program to run. An instance of the compiler  is created and set up . The path to the various Perl6 and NQP libraries that you may need are determined and bound to environment variables. Several command line options are added . Then, the compiler is actually entered with a call to command_line . command_line begins to execute. This me...

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...

As mentioned in my last post, I'm working on making a linker for Perl 6 user programs as part of the Google Summer of Code. I'll be making weekly progress updates here explaining what I've done and  In this post, I'm going to cover why a linker is useful/what a linker is, how I'm approaching the project, and what progress I've made so far. I'm learning a lot of this as I go, so if you see something that's confusing or incorrect, please let me know so I can fix it! What does a linker do? The TLDR version is that a linker is what takes all the object files generated by compilation, resolves the calls to functions in libraries and other files, and combines them into a single executable file. Being able to generate this single executable file is extremely useful as it means that once the program has been "translated" from whatever language it was written in into bytecode and grouped into an executable order, you can run that program over and ...