And the winner is Oleksander Kiryuhin (aka sena_kun aka Altai-man).

The Rainbow Butterfly Award is awarded to Oleksander for their tireless efforts as release manager of the Raku Programming Language for two years (2020-2021), and their work on getting a more functional Raku documentation in general, and a better documentation web site in particular.

And generally being available helping people with questions regarding Raku, Cro and/or Comma on IRC and elsewhere.

We thank Oleksander for their work and hope to see more of it, especially in these difficult times while his hometown of Kherson (Херсо́н) is still under siege.

The Raku Conference 2023

The Raku Conference 2023 will be in-person on 3-4 August 2023 in Riga, Latvia, so mark those dates!

Registration for the conference is now open. And you can submit your talks: the deadline is still far away, but it’s never too early to think about what you would like to talk about!

Rawley’s Corner

Rawley Fowler liked the protocol, so wrote a client and server for Net::Gemini. And made distributing C++ code with your Raku distributions easier with their Distribution::Builder::Cmake module.

Steve’s Corner

Steve Dondley wrote about their new Distribution::Extension::Updater module which allows one to easily change extensions of files in distributions to the new Raku-style extensions.

Anton’s Corner

Anton Antonov discusses the generation of random sentences using the Raku Programming Language again, this time in Using Tries for Markov chain text generation (/r/rakulang comments).

Steering Council

The minutes of the January 22, 2023 meeting are available.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #202 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• Feature request: snip counterpart for Str
• Supply blocks may reorder flow of execution

New Pull Requests

• Make (-1).log mathematically correct
• [JVM] Fix breakage with use v6.e.PREVIEW

Core Developments

• Vadim Belman implemented support for the $*HLL-COMPILER dynamic variable, providing access to NQP‘s HLL::Compiler object that is used for compilation. And introduced a new way of tracking language versions under the hood.
• Christian Bartolomäus added some DISP_* constants to NQP and brought the behaviour of nqp::isstr|num|int on the JVM backend in line with the MoarVM backend, fixing some NullPointerExceptions. And also fixes some RakuAST related breakage on the JVM Backend.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen introduced the $*EXIT and $*EXCEPTION dynamic variables to distinguish a normal exit of a program from a non-normal one.
• Márton Polgár fixed an issue with the internal structure of object hashes leaking out in some situations.
• Daniel Green made creating Bags and Mixes from an Iterable about 10% faster.
• The documentation team has been making great strides in getting the new documentation website operational, together with the new infra team (sneak peek)!
• In RakuAST news: Stefan Seifert was on a roll once again this week:
  • Fixed issues with quotewords and heredocs, consumption of role bodies, the REPL, default type on signatures, parameter constraints referencing the parameter, expressions that are part of a name, canonicalization of Array composers, implicit *%_ in signature, placeholder %_ in methods, support for SETTING:: PseudoStash
  • Implement is copy trait on arrays and hashes
  • Implement support for MAIN arguments
  • Fully implement currying of infixes
  • Internal reorganization of BEGIN handling, needed to fix some compile time order issues in the future.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen was also a bit on a RakuAST roll by adding support for the CLOSE, QUIT, ENTER, KEEP, UNDO, PRE and POST phasers.
• The number of passing test-files with the new Raku grammar are now 125/139 (make test +23) and 658/1355 (make spectest +31).

Questions about Raku

• How can I split a string in every possible way? by Jim Bollinger.
• No TAP on Windows by Kay Rhodes.
• Default value in new method causing object construction to work in an unexpected way by Steve Dondley.
• Feedback on conditional tasks by Alexey Melezhik.
• The opposite of %% by Julia.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• A love letter by Julia.
• No podcast left behind by Julia.
• Imagine by Mark Gardner.
• A long mug (not) gone by Salve J. Nilsen.
• You might also like by Profoundly Nerdy.
• Feeling bad for Matt by Julia.
• No braces! by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Much like a better by Wim Vanderbauwhede.

Meanwhile, still on Twitter

• Two different languages by Joaquín Ferrero.
• Raku does as well by Skye Soss.
• Reminiscing by Joaquín Ferrero.
• Rambdas by Leon Timmermans.
• Awesome by Matheus Westhelle.
• Any day was yesterday by Joaquín Ferrero.

Comments

• Other placeholders by Ralph Mellor.
• Raku shirts on freewear.org.
• Easier to support bvy vvillena.
• Not a joke by Sam.
• Raku mode on the Emacs wiki.
• Parsers that are grammars by Ralph Mellor.
• The origins of computer language names on /r/etymology.

New Raku Modules

• Distribution::Extension::Updater “Update legacy file extensions in a Raku distribution” by Steve Dondley.
• Dan::Polars “Bridge Dan to Rust Polars” by Steve Roe.
• Distribution::Builder::Cmake “A zef builder to aid in binding CMake projects to Raku” by Rawley Fowler.

Updated Raku Modules

• Archive::Libarchive::Raw by Fernando Santagata.
• Grammar::TokenProcessing, ML::TriesWithFrequencies by Anton Antonov.
• App::termie by Brian Duggan.
• Humming-Bird by Rawley Fowler.
• PublicSuffix by JJ Atria.
• PDF by David Warring.
• Directory by Steve Dondley.
• Sparky by Alexey Melezhik.
• GTK::Simple, Raku::Pod::Render, Collection, Collection-Plugins by Richard Hainsworth.
• Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• BusyIndicator by Joelle Maslak.
• fez by Tony O’Dell.

Winding down

A week with a well-deserved award. And a flurry of activity on the Raku core. And an in-person conference to look forward to! Meanwhile, please keep the people in Ukraine in mind who are still fighting the Russian aggression. Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

Please keep staying safe, keep staying healthy, and keep up the good work!

If you like what I’m doing, committing to a small sponsorship would mean a great deal!