How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
Basically he wanted home automation in Perl to control his geothermal/solar house, and ended up reimplementing Perl with AI. That's some yak shaving...
IIRC that technique is called benching, not shoring -- you cut steps into the soil rather than installing support boards. Still sketchy at that depth, agreed, but it's a recognized method for shallow trenches.
Deep-linking into a reveal slideshow from the presentation - which is meant to be navigated by keyboard arrows ONLY - is suboptimal.
Yes, standing in such a hole is normally not recommended without shoring - safety first - but you do not know the soil specifics. It's like concrete, the excavator digging that hole stood on its very edge after 2 days of rain no problem at all. Disadvantage of such soil is that the percolation rate goes against zero.
Yes, doing a "Perl Interpreter" (it's way more than that) even with the help of the most advanced AI on the planet is PITA. The coding agents do fake, lie or are way out of their depth, but when you are used to limited AI since the 90ies - like me - you know how to handle it. Good News is that in 2 years you will probably tell your AI to create you - just for the laughs - a Perl interpreter AND smarthome system before you go to bed. You will have them ready for breakfast.
As for the maturity of the project, it's really too soon. I thought the German Perl Workshop would be in May, but mixed that up with last years' date, so I presented what I had. In about two months this should be nice(r).
And one final remark: Everyone knows Torvalds for the Linux kernel. Most don't know or ignore he did git too. Here, I presented two things: WHIP and pperl.
WHIP being a smarthome solution way above and beyond what is available on the market today, but that seems to somehow evade peoples minds when they see the slides.
It's a very interesting project (even if I always avoided Perl and 'officially don't care'). And so it sucks you got a mediocre response because dum slideshow UI issues. Maybe write up a blog post and try again later (just make sure its not too chatgpt-ish).
The "not too chatgpt-ish" caveat is doing a lot of work here -- how do you write convincingly about an AI-assisted parallelizer without sounding like you're regurgitating hype? Genuine benchmarks on real Perl codebases would cut through that faster than any prose style choice.
Slides navigable by keyboard arrows only is a legitimate design choice for a presentation tool, but it fails completely as documentation. If the project matters, there should be a written page explaining it. Linking to slide 4/1/1 and calling deep-linking "suboptimal" is just avoiding the real problem.
I'm interested, but can't navigate the website. The down-arrow in the lower-right is unclickable, maybe covered by some semi-transparent chrome of my browser, not sure. And no idea why there need to be 4 directional arrows.
That's Reveal.js / Slides.com format. It became very popular in 2010s. The idea behind the 2-d navigation is that you can use left-to-right to move between chapters, and move down to dive into a specific chapter. This allows you to skip chapters due to time constraints. Or hide gnarly details about something so that these specific slides do not break the flow of presentation but still having them available for the audience online. Or, having slides announcing demos, but if demos do not work the down slide would have a video demonstrating how the demo is supposed to work. Many possibilities like this. Also the slides are produces using Markdown, so the format was appealing to many authors.
However, doing chapters well turned out to be tricky. Ideally you want them to be of similar size and have 3 to 7 of them in the talk, but many presentations aren't structured like this. The rise of Slideshare and SpeakerDeck for sharing slides in mid 2010s caused this 2-d navigation to go out of favor: those services only support linear static slides. This is also a reason why people use fewer animations in slides nowadays and why tools like Prezi didn't catch on (that was another presentation tool with non-standard navigation that went out of favor very quickly).
Many people still use Reveal.js to make their slides but they stick to left-to-right nav only.
Ugh, deep links should be part of the path, and anchor should be where on the page to scroll. Very annoying slide software. If the content weren't so good I simply wouldn't bother.
This looks like a huge project, even with AI help... I have a sweet spot for perl but I'm honestly not sure if the current community has the bandwidth and interest to sustain an alternative implementation. At the very least it should be ported to MacOS too. Breaking with XS is a bold decision. Best of luck though!!
macOS is the easy part.
XS is the problem, because once you break that bridge, a lot of serious CPAN distros turn into deadweight, with somebody stuck redoing piles of dependecies plus the weird hooks old tooling expects.
If anything kills this project it won't be platform support.
It'll be perl's regex engine, the ancient edge cases around it, and the fact that AI can spit out code that compiles while still missing half the assumptions buried in moduels people still need.
"Auto-Parallelization - Automatic parallel map, grep, for, while loops via Rayon work-stealing"
Given any kind of "for" loop, how can it know that there is no synchronization required ? That no mutual exclusion is required ? No concurrent access of some kind ? Offloading some work to another process/thread is expensive, too
If the inner body of the loop is a pure-function, then that's easy (except for the performance part, which may require heuristics or something). But if the body is not pure .. ? I cannot see how this can work reliably with any random code
It's a kind of crappy slide deck, not a proper home page. Even worse, the link drops you into the middle of the deck. (TBF, it wouldn't be so bad if you know that it's a slide deck when you load the page.)
Try using the arrow keys to navigate. It took me multiple tries to get it figured out.
Use up/down to navigate within a chapter/topic.
Use left/right to switch between topics.
Broken UI on a project about automated parallelism. The irony writes itself. Wonder how it handles race conditions if it can't wire up a click handler.
The project relies on Rayon [1] for scheduling parallel tasks and Cranelift [2] to JIT the hot loops.
There are plenty of other interesting features like auto-FFI, bytecode caching (similar to Python's .pyc files), and "daemonize" mode (similar to mod_perl or FastCGI).
I had to build a Perl implementation of the Chaskey mac algorithm. ChatGPT spat out a working Perl prototype based on a C file for Arduino. It quite slow with not very much to optimize, so I made it write it with XS. A hour later I have a working XS implementation that compiles and tests cleanly.
So the AutoFFI thing is super interesting. The .plc also.
I wonder how long he waited for the CPAN nologin case. I remember requesting a CPAN account 3 years back and it took ~2 months for someone to look at and accept.
Very good, actually. But you have to nudge them slightly. Tell them you prefer the modern version of the language, with gradual typing† and function signatures, and you'll get very good results. Perl interpreter comes standard on modern OSes and due to permissive licensing and impeccable backwards compatibility you can always assume you deal with very modern versions of Perl.
I write Perl scripts that are 10-100 lines of code, and at this size Perl is a Strictly Better Bash: better syntax, some type checking, better text support, and still effortless calls to external processes: essentially you put a command with arguments in backticks, and you get it's output. Ruby can do it too, but not all systems have it. Python is another obvious choice but calling external commands in it is annoying. I also use Perl for some one-liners as a better `sed` for text replacements.
† Perl nowadays have TypeScript-style type checking for function parameters. So, while the syntax is wild sometimes, the language is much better than it used to be.
Basically he wanted home automation in Perl to control his geothermal/solar house, and ended up reimplementing Perl with AI. That's some yak shaving...