Rakudo Roadmap
--------------

Last updated: 2012-06-07

This document serves as a guide to the major goals for Rakudo
development, as things stood in December 2011. They have been
roughly categorized. Each has been given a 1-3 priority
indicator, where 1 is "fairly pressing", 2 is "desirable",
and 3 is "wanted, but not a key goal right now".  Each item
also has from one to five asterisks indicating the estimated
"degree of effort" required for the item.

A lower priority does not mean, "don't work on this". If you
want to hack on a priority 3 item, go right ahead. It is, after
all, wanted. And things that are priority 3 now will eventually
work their way up to the top anyway. Mostly, -Ofun.

Some items are marked with the names of people likely to either
work on them OR serve as a "contact person" for the goal. Again,
don't let a name already being against a goal stop you working
on it - though it would be wise that you check where the marked
person is at with it to avoid any duplicated effort, or to pick
up hints about how to jump in. :-)

Patches to this document are welcome - to add missing goals,
remove completed ones, re-prioritize, volunteer for a goal,
rescue yourself from a goal, etc.

Compiler Performance/Portability Improvements (jnthn)
2 ***** design, implement and switch to QAST
2 **    finish up any remaining s/pir::/nqp::/
2 ?     re-organize Rakudo, build process, etc. for multi-backend
3 **    Optimizing multis for `[+] 1..10` and `[<=] 1..10` etc.

Macros (masak)
2 ***   quasiquote splicing
2 **    hygienic macros and the COMPILING:: pseudopackage
2 ****  "delayed" declarations of routines and types within quasiquotes
3 ?     Textual macros

Operators
2 *     precedence traits for user defined operators (jnthn)
2 ***   missing native operators, including ++/-- (jnthn)
3 **    logical cascades
3 **    operator adverbs

Regexes
2 **    array variable interpolation
2 **    ~~ inside regexes
2 *     Null pattern detection (at parse time)
3 **    <*foo>
3 **    <~~0>, <~~foo>
3 ***   explicit backtracking control (::, :::)
3 **    <cut> and <commit>

Built-ins/Data Structures
2 ***   throwing typed exceptions (moritz)
2 ***   packed arrays (jnthn)
2 ***** NFG strings, .codes, .graphs, etc.
2 **    Rat/FatRat/Rational cleanup
2 ***   other S02 data types -- KeySet, KeyBag (tadzik)
2 **    sized/shaped arrays (jnthn)
2 ***   val() (japhb)
3 ***   arrays with custom keys
3 ***   complete Buf implementation
3 ***   complete LoL and slice context implementation
3 ***   Cat and stream matching

Phasers
2 **    LAST/NEXT/FIRST in loops other than for loops

Language Features
1 ***   basic Perl 5 interop (use, eval, etc.)
2 ***   heredocs
2 *     $=DATA and friends (tadzik)
2 **    module versioning
2 **    missing bits of enums
2 ***   new syntax/semantics for coercion (jnthn)
2 **    MAIN and USAGE (japhb)
2 **    Failure changes (japhb)
3 ***   domain specific languages -- slang and grammar tweaks
3 ****  more advanced Perl 5 interop (lexical embedding, etc.)

Optimizer (jnthn)
2 **    ro/rw variable tracking, related transforms
2 **    context/non-context variable tracking
2 ***   :D/:U constraint tracking and integration with dispatch analysis
2 **    inlining of routines that do method calls
2 *     topic preservation elimination on simple block inlines
2 ***   inlining calls to methods
3 ***   guard lifting for method call inlining

STD Convergence (needs more exploration)
2 ***   adopt STD's highwater error handling
2 **    align error handling approach more with STDs
2 ***   using mixins for derived languages
2 ***   more of STDs TTIAR error handling
3 **    work on convergence with STD's quote parsing
