Update: M0 is dead, Parrot is effectively doomed, and the author believes that Rakudo is irrelevant. This post is now a historical curiosity.
Less Magic, Less C, A Faster Parrot promised a few small tasks for the interested to help the Parrot optimization project reach its goals.
M0 is one of those goals. This small set of opcodes represents the minimum necessary platform-specific code required to implement the rest of Parrot. M0 is a specification. Like Perl 6 is a specification, there can be multiple implementations. The demo implementation is a Perl program, and my C implementation is the second implementation (and hopefully a likely candidate to become part of Parrot itself).
Like Perl 6, M0 is a specification and a test suite.
Unlike Perl 6, the M0 test suite is tied to the original implementation. That is to say, when you run the M0 tests, you exercise the Perl demo M0 implementation.
A small task for the interested is to decouple the M0 test suite from the Perl M0 implementation and make those tests available for multiple implementations. This probably means representing those tests in a form with expected inputs and outputs, perhaps running M0 source code through an assembler to create M0 bytecode, and running the tests against an arbitrary implementation.
Perl 6's test suite has an interesting capability whereby the list of tests contains metadata on which known implementation should skip or try to run but not expect to pass arbitrary test files. The #perl6 channel on irc.freenode.net can give you more details about this fudging process.
This project does easily parallelize across multiple interested people. Coordinating in #parrot on irc.perl.org will help.
As a bonus test, the C implementation should allow optional testing with Valgrind, if installed. All tests should run without memory leaks or invalid memory accesses. (I tested the C implementation by hand, but automating this is essential for further development.) This task is slightly more complex, but should be within reach for any Perl programmer of modest experience.
