[psoc-2008] Week of June 16th, progress report

[Andrew Whitworth]

Last week was a very active and productive one, although this report
is going to be relatively short. In the past week I've tied up most of
the loose ends that I've been leaving, and I've reached the stage of
code-completion for basic operation modes. As of last night, Parrot in
the gsoc_pdd09 branch compiles without error. Of course, saying "it
compiles" is far different from saying that "it operates correctly".

Running through the test suite, Parrot with the new garbage collector
appears to pass about half of all tests. The remaining half fails,
typically through segmentation faults. This is good, because seeing
what tests do and do not pass will help me to narrow down where the
errors lie, and will help to focus my debugging effort. Unfortunately,
due to the nature of this project, debugging may be a difficult
process.

My intentions from this point forward are to get the GC working with
the current feature set. Once debugged and properly operational, I
will attempt to add extra features and modes, as time allows. In
addition, once operational, I would like to carefully benchmark the
performance of the new collector, to prove it is a net improvement
over the current collector.

This week, I am mostly busy, and will not be able to get much work
done. My schedule clears up again by the 30th, and I should be back to
work as normal. There is a possibility I could be late or may miss
#parrotsketch tomorrow, due to an appointment I have in the morning.
I'll try to send my report early, if I won't make it to the meeting on
time.

--Andrew Whitworth