Intro

The PMC Union is being deprecated, which means that any instances of PMC_int_val, etc need to disappear. This is a big job with several gotchas.

What Needs to Happen

The following PMCs should be straightforward to convert to ATTRs. If a PMC has a certain macro listed, only convert uses of that macro to ATTRs for the PMC. Other UnionVal macros have depenency issues which are not yet resolvable.

PMC	status
BigInt	fixed in r35664
Continuation (PMC_pmc_val only)
Coroutine (PMC_pmc_val only)
Float	in progress
LexPad (PMC_pmc_val only)
LuaBoolean
LuaThread
ManagedStruct (PMC_int_val only)
MatchRange (PMC_int_val2 only)
NameSpace (PMC_pmc_val only)
SArray
TQueue	fixed in r35653

Allison  explained in depth how to convert code. Good example code can be found in src/pmc/exporter.pmc .

Inheritance

Because the PMC union struct is part of a PMC's internals, its use is affected by PMC inheritance. The following image shows the dependencies between all *core* PMCs. This does not include PMCs from HLLs. Because of these dependencies, all PMCs in a given dependency tree will have to be updated simultaneously. This only means that all instances of e.g. PMC_struct_val will have to be updated, not all instances of all PMC_x_val.

Notes

*Array PMCs need to have their mark VTABLE methods updated to actually mark the elements inside them. src/gc/mark_sweep.c:Parrot_gc_trace_pmc_data() attempts to do this by mucking around with PMC_data_typed(). Once the mark VTABLE methods are updated to do The Right Thing, Parrot_gc_trace_pmc_data() can be deprecated along with the PObj_data_is_PMC_array_FLAG. All arrays should instead be marked with PObj_custom_mark_FLAG to call the proper mark VTABLE methods.

* src/gc/mark_sweep.c also uses PMC_struct_val in two places. This needs to be investigated and the data stored elsewhere. See TT #178.