Jonathan Worthington writes:

I have completed the initial 200 hours awarded under my Perl 6 performance and reliability engineering grant. This report summarizes what has been achieved in this time. I have also written a number of more detailed blog posts about my work.

Tooling

I implemented heap snapshots in MoarVM. This is a mechanism for taking recordings of what is in the heap after each garbage collection run. It can be used to understand the memory use of programs, but also to track down memory leaks. The snapshots are produced by passing the --profile=heap option when invoking Rakudo Perl 6. They can then be analyzed using a tool, which I implemented in Perl 6. It makes good use of both native arrays and parallel processing, and so also serves as a good example of a Perl 6 program processing a non-trivial volume of data. The data appears to be something of a goldmine, and following up on and addressing everything raised by it will probably keep us busy for a good while. It has already been used to track down memory leaks and fix them.