use Perl

So, with becoming fully CFT enabled on the 11th (just 7 more days) I'll have a few weeks to focus on some of my more crack fuelled and backburnered ideas of the last few months.

They are, in no particular order:

• play with Matts' PPerl and find out why it doesn't like me
• fiddle with ithreads in bleadperl/5.8. It's looking like these are going to be fairly cool if sky gets a chance to fix a few of the final bugs before 5.8 hits the streets.
  As an example, this: perl -Mthreads -e'thread->create(sub { while (1) {} })'
  is currently a guaranteed segfault, and it'd be nicer if it wasn't, even if handling it "correctly" is the stuff of nightmares
• work on a bleadperl to CVS gateway. I've already had success in feeding it copies of perlsnap all the way back to perl@14015 but for real use it needs to be gating the perl.perl5.changes list.
• fix my van
• play with Simons optimizer module, to see if inlining subs is an actual win in perl
• get a new job
• Hack up some generic guard to checking that SvCUR(sv) == strlen(SvPV_nolen(sv)) if the value is likely to be passed to something with C-like string semantics