Author Archives: pmichaud

A Rakudo Performance

Posted on 2012/09/02 by pmichaud

At YAPC::NA 2012 in Madison, WI I gave a lightning talk about basic improvements in Rakudo’s performance over the past couple of years.  Earlier today the video of the lightning talks session appeared on YouTube; I’ve clipped out my talk … Continue reading →

Posted in perl6, rakudo | 4 Comments

Roborama 2012a

Posted on 2012/05/28 by pmichaud

A couple of weeks ago I entered the Dallas Personal Robotics Group Roborama 2012a competition, and managed to come away with first place in the RoboColumbus event and Line Following event (Senior Level).  For my robot I used one of … Continue reading →

Posted in lego, robotics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Oslo Perl 6 Patterns Hackathon, Days 1-2

Posted on 2012/04/22 by pmichaud

For the past couple of days I’ve been in Oslo, Norway, attending the Perl 6 Patterns Hackathon sponsored by Oslo Perl Mongers, Jan Ingvoldstad IT, and NUUG Foundation. A lot of things are happening at the hackathon, as you’ll see below. First, Oslo … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

FLL: Matching LEGO wheels

Posted on 2012/02/10 by pmichaud

This last fall my wife and I sponsored and coached a FIRST LEGO League robotics team that competed in the North Texas FLL Regional Tournament. We all had a great time and learned a lot. In the process we also … Continue reading →

Posted in fll, lego, northtexasfll | Leave a comment

Some thoughts on YAPC::EU 2011

Posted on 2011/08/18 by pmichaud

YAPC::EU 2011 in Riga has just about finished, and it has been great seeing long-time friends again and making new ones. I’ve heard many people remark that we really wish there could be more weeks like these. There are two … Continue reading →

Posted in perl6, rakudo | 2 Comments

New regex engine for nqp and nom, now passing 7K spectests

Posted on 2011/07/14 by pmichaud

Nom and nqp now have a new regular expression engine (currently known as “QRegex”) that I’ve implemented over the past week. As progress continued on the new “nom” branch of Rakudo since my last posting, it was becoming increasingly evident … Continue reading →

Posted in nqp, perl6, rakudo | 3 Comments

More nom features and spectests, still 5x faster than master

Posted on 2011/07/02 by pmichaud

Progress continues on the nom branch of Rakudo. As of this writing we’re up to 89 spectest files and over 1000 passing spectests, which is a good improvement from just five days ago. We continue to see that nom performs … Continue reading →

Posted in perl6, rakudo | 1 Comment

Lots of Rakudo-nom progress, starts to run spectests

Posted on 2011/06/27 by pmichaud

The nom branch of Rakudo continues to develop at a blistering pace. Yesterday nom finally had a working Test.pm, which meant we could start testing it against the spectest (“roast”) suite. As of this writing nom is passing 50 spectest … Continue reading →

Posted in perl6, rakudo | 1 Comment

Perl 6 lists, episode 1

Posted on 2011/06/22 by pmichaud

This past week I’ve worked on adding list support to nom, including lazy lists and infinite lists. Lists in Perl 6 have had a bit of a convoluted history; early drafts were very non-specific about how Lists should work, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Rakudo (nom) reaches milestone — no more .pir files!

Posted on 2011/06/14 by pmichaud

As Jonathan Worthington and I have posted in various articles, we’re working on a new implementation of Rakudo Perl 6 (the nom branch) that is based on a new meta-object model instead of the object system provided by Parrot. Today … Continue reading →

Posted in perl6, rakudo | Leave a comment