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:
- The original source (build instructions below)
- Pre-built PDFs
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
makeprogram (nmakeon Windows works just fine too) - Perl 5.10 or above
- Pandoc (see http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/)
- The
latex,dvipsandps2pdfcommands 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 info@edument.se. To learn more about Edument and our other awesome courses, see http://edument.se/.