If the current ponie in CVS is built with full defaults for parrot, then
it fails to build Unicode::Normalize, and fails about 40 regression tests.
If parrot's garbage collector is changed from the default (compacting, IIRC)
to the either libc or malloc, then ponie only fails 6 tests. ie make this
change:

Index: Configure.pl
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/public/ponie/Configure.pl,v
retrieving revision 1.12
diff -r1.12 Configure.pl
47c47,48
<     system($^X,'Configure.pl',"--ccflags= :add{ -I$dir/perl}") && die "error";
---

As I understand it parrot's default garbage collector will move data blocks
owned by PMCs. However, all of the PMCs ponie generates do not have gc-owned
data attached to them, so there should be no difference. Chatting with Dan
on IRC we think that it has to be a bug in parrot's GC.

Unfortunately Arthur and I can't get it down to a simple test case. For
example on x86 Linux t/op/pat fails at test 345 with parrot's default gc,
but that whole test passes with gc=libc. Trying to cut down the regression
tests to the fail point makes them pass, which suggests that it's the
cumulative resource usage that is really the problem, not any particular
perl construction. [tests fail in different places on OS X. Not tried other
systems yet. Still fighting AIX]

We're not sure how to track this one down further - at the moment the best
plan seems to be to apply the above patch to ponie, and make a snapshot
release with it in.

I've attached the diff between TEST run for the two configurations.

Nicholas Clark

testlog 9K Download