Parallel Perl – autoparallelizing interpreter with JIT

(perl.petamem.com)

43 points | by bmn__ 2 days ago

10 comments

  • quantummagic 1 hour ago
    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.
    • andrewl-hn 1 hour ago
      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.

    • sherr 1 hour ago
      Going to the link and just hitting the spacebar worked for me. Next slide, and so on. Firefox/Linux.
    • interroboink 59 minutes ago
      I have the same problem with the mouse (little page marker overlay covers the down arrow).

      But using keyboard arrow keys work for me.

  • 0xbadcafebee 1 hour ago
    WHOA. Talk about burying the lede... Look from the beginning of the slide show, he made a super cool geothermal project! Look at the size of this hole!! https://perl.petamem.com/gpw2026/perl-mit-ai-gpw2026.html#/1... His cad drawings are great too!

    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...

    • jwineinger 40 minutes ago
      Standing in that hole without shoring... no thanks. Impressive project nonetheless though
  • chrisaycock 56 minutes ago
    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).

    [1] https://docs.rs/rayon/latest/rayon/

    [2] https://cranelift.dev

  • hintymad 48 minutes ago
    The slides got stuck at https://perl.petamem.com/gpw2026/perl-mit-ai-gpw2026.html#/6. The right arrow disappeared. The down arrow was flashing, but did not respond to any clicks. I tried different browsers on my mac. None worked.
  • bheadmaster 40 minutes ago
    The down arrow doesn't respond because of the overlay page number. Only when clicking a little bit left of the overlay, it will work.

    I can't help but giggle at the fact that AI written project doesn't seem to get its home page right.

  • bmn__ 2 days ago
    Homepage: https://perl.petamem.com

    In case HN shows its user hostility again by cutting off the URI fragment, the intended deep-link was presentation slide #/4/1/1

    • throwaway27448 37 minutes ago
      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.
      • jaen 34 minutes ago
        HTML+JavaScript-based statically hostable apps (eg. presentations) can't use paths as deep links, since there's no standard for simple static hosting or URL rewriting (even 30 years later). Oh well.
  • postepowanieadm 1 hour ago
    I'm too scared to check how good llms are in writing perl.
    • andrewl-hn 1 hour ago
      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.

    • man8alexd 1 hour ago
      Codex for some reason sometimes runs Perl instead of Python to work with local files
  • shevy-java 46 minutes ago
    When will perl 7 be released?
  • gjvc 1 hour ago
    slop