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Rakudo and NQP Internals Workshop

What's in here?

This repository contains course material for a workshop on Rakudo and NQP internals. In here you'll find:

Abstract

This intensive 2-day workshop takes a deep dive into many areas of the Rakudo Perl 6 and NQP internals, mostly focusing on the backend-agnostic parts but with some coverage of the JVM and future MoarVM backends also. During the course, participants will build their own small compiler, complete with a simple class-based object system, to help them understand how the toolchain works.

Prerequisites

A reasonable knowledge of the Perl 6 language and, preferably, a little experience working with NQP also.

Day 1

The eagle's eye view: Compilers, and the NQP/Rakudo Architecture
  • What compilers do
  • What runtimes do
  • Perl 6 challenges
  • NQP as a language
  • NQP as a compiler construction toolchain
  • QAST
  • The nqp:: op set
  • Bootstrapping in a nutshell
  • How Rakudo uses NQP

The NQP Language

  • Design goals
  • Literals, variables, control flow
  • Subroutines, pointy blocks, closure semantics
  • Classes, attributes, methods
  • Regexes and grammars
  • Roles
  • Multiple dispatch
  • Built-ins and nqp:: ops
  • Exception handling
  • Limitations and other differences from full Perl 6
  • Shortcomings

The compilation pipeline

  • The HLL::Compiler class
  • Frontends, backends, and the QAST between them
  • Parsing with grammars, AST building with actions
  • Code generation
  • Building a tiny language from scratch

QAST

  • QAST::Node, the base of it all
  • The overall structure of an AST
  • Literals: QAST::IVal, QAST::NVal and QAST::SVal
  • Operations: QAST::Op, basic examples
  • Sequencing: QAST::Stmts, QAST::Stmt
  • Variables: QAST::Var, QAST::VarWithFallback, scope, decl, value
  • The block symbols table
  • Invocation
  • Parameters and arguments
  • Contextualization: QAST::Want
  • Block references: QAST::BVal
  • Object references: QAST::WVal
  • The backend escape hatch: QAST::VM
  • At the top: QAST::CompUnit

Exploring nqp:: ops

  • Arithmetic
  • Relational
  • Aggregate
  • String
  • Flow control
  • Exception related
  • Context introspection
  • Big integer

Day 2

6model

  • Objects: behavior + state
  • Types and kinds
  • Meta-objects
  • Representations
  • STables
  • knowhow, the root of it all
  • Building a simple object system from scratch
  • Adding objects to our little language, using a World
  • Method caches
  • Type checking
  • Boolification
  • Invocation
  • Exploring NQP's meta-objects
  • Exploring Rakudo's meta-objects
  • Container handling

Bounded Serialization and Module Loading

  • The compile-time/runtime boundary
  • Serialization contexts
  • QAST::WVal revisited
  • What's "bounded" about it
  • Repossession, conflicts and other such terror
  • nqp:: ops related to serialization contexts
  • The World, revisisted
  • How module loading works

The regex and grammar engine

  • The QAST::Regex node and its subtypes
  • Cursor and Match
  • The bstack and the cstack
  • NFAs and Longest Token Matching

The JVM backend

  • An overview of the JVM
  • The QAST to JAST translator
  • The runtime support library

The MoarVM backend

  • An overview of MoarVM
  • The QAST to MAST translator

Build Instructions

Run the Makefile to build the slides for the two days. To do this, you will need:

  • A make program (nmake on Windows works just fine too)
  • Perl 5.10 or above
  • Pandoc (see http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/)
  • The latex, dvips and ps2pdf commands in your path

On Linux you can do something like:

apt-get install texlive
apt-get install pandoc

On Windows, there is a Pandoc installer from the URL mentioned above, then install MiKTeX for the other commands.

Course Delivery

This course material is made available by Edument AB under a Creative Commons license (see LICENSE file) to support the Perl 6 development community. It is, however, best experienced live! If you're interested in having this material delivered by an experienced instructor at a location of your choice, feel free to contact us at [email protected]. To learn more about Edument and our other awesome courses, see http://edument.se/.