Thanks to the tireless efforts of release managers Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev and Samantha McVey, this week finally saw a new Rakudo Compiler release again: 2019.11. For packagers, this is the first release that is fully relocatable. Kudos to the 65 contributors to this release! And kudos to Claudio Ramirez to immediately supply packages for many Linux distributions that now also support relocatable builds!

This also brings an end to the era in which Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev has done 27 (twenty-seven!) Rakudo compiler releases in the past 2+ years. On behalf of the Raku Community, I would like to thank Aleks-Daniel for his tireless efforts, again and again! Fortunately, Alexander Kiryuhin has stepped up to take their place.

Comma Complete

Jonathan Worthington also announced a new release: Comma Complete, the preferred IDE for Raku for many! This is the full-featured paid version of Comma, which also comes in a Comma Community edition that can be downloaded for free (feature comparison).

Adventing started

This year saw the start of two Raku based Advent blog sites, and one mixed Advent blog: the official Raku Advent Calendar (by many different authors), Sterling Hanenkamp‘s Async & Concurrency Advent and the Weekly Challenge Advent. So these are the blog posts so far:

• Day 1 – Raku from Perl: Transforming Old Perl Code by Tom Browder.
• Day 2 – CRUD with Cro::HTTP, a tutorial by Alexander Kiryuhin.

And the blog posts by Sterling Hanenkamp:

• Day 1 – Introducing Async & Concurrency
• Day 2 – Promises

And the Weekly Challenge ones that cover Raku:

• Day 1 – Word Ladder by Laurent Rosenfeld.

Renaming Progress

• It looks like Sterling Hanenkamp, with support by Justin DeVuyst, will take over the vim-perl6 package to move it into the Raku era!
• Andrew Shitov reports that Raku has a booth at FOSDEM 2020 on both 1 and 2 February in Brussels, Belgium: there will not be a Perl booth.

Squashathon Time Again

Last month’s Squashathon somehow fell between the cracks, but this weekend (6/7/8 December) there will be another Squashathon! This time focused on fixing the Raku FAQ, which currently has such gems as: “What’s the difference between Raku, Rakudo and Raku?” (courtesy of the automatic renaming process).

Seeking Feedback on Rakudo.js

Paweł Murias is seeking feedback on his work on the Rakudo Javascript backend, so that all of his work on his long running grant can be considered completed. Please have a look at the Javascript backend and give us your feedback!

A Raku CoC

Originally conceived as part of the design specifications, but never as such implemented. Now a Pull Request is underway to upgrade it to current best practices and the Raku era. Comments / Suggestions / Additions are welcome!

Rewriting Legacy Code

Jeff Goff has continued his blog posts about porting OLE::Storage_Lite: Rewriting Legacy Code for Raku II: Electric Boogaloo Still looking forward to seeing the first module upload to the ecosystem!

Weekly Challenge

Here are the Raku entries for Challenge #36:

• Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN) and the Knapsack Problem by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Vin Knapsack Meets Raku by Arne Sommer.
• Weekly Challenge #36 by Javier Luque.

Of course, Challenge #37 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert did an enormous amount of work, fixing a lot of little issues in MoarVM, mostly related to signedness and aliasing violations. They did this by activating more compiler warnings and making sure that these (new) warnings got fixed. They also fixed an issue with the serialization of external library names in precompiled modules that use NativeCall.
• Daniel Green also did some cleanup work by removing unused variable declarations in C code.
• Jan-Olof Hendig fixed a number of MoarVM issues on ARM architectures.
• Vadim Belman added support for silent building of Rakudo. They also changed the way compiler version is selected when compiling the different language version, making sure the latest optimizations are always used.
• Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev did some rakufication of release support scripts, while finishing the 2019.11 Rakudo Compiler Release.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made the decontainerization operator ($foo<>) about 20x faster, after Peter du Marchie van Voorthuysen spotted it being slow. They also made DateTime.new(epoch) about 2x faster.
• Tom Browder added support for the log2 function.
• Patrick Böker changed the use of the erroneously called PERL6_HOME environment variable to RAKUDO_HOME in the entire build process.
• And quite a few smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Raku

• Web development using Raku by Vilpesh Mistry.
• Perl regex vs. Raku regex, differences in the engine? by Holli.
• How can I create pop-up windows in Windows? by Todd.
• Test failing when executed in a different order by Fernando Santagata.
• Using Cro run for rebuilding changed client side files by Richard Hainsworth.
• How do I read mixed parameters from the command line? by Todd.
• What do I say about the rename? by HortenseAndI.
• Idiomatic way to iterate over copies of elements? by zeekar.
• Writable container in for loop by ikarpenis.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Updated all answers by Simon Proctor.
• Amazing Pottery! by mempko.
• Renamed it? by Spatula Octopus.
• Migrated by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Tipping off videos by The Perl Shop.
• Hurt Bad by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Number guessing by Siavash.
• Keep forgetting by Dr. Roy Schestowitz (罗伊).
• It worked! BY Simon Proctor.
• Underwhelming way by JJ Merelo.
• Comma Complete by Jonathan Worthington.
• It’s beautiful by mempko.
• Funniest, easiest and powerful by Joaquín Ferrero.
• Precompiled Packages! by Šimon Bořek.
• Can it get shorter? by Tyler Limkemann.
• Tyranny of Rocket by Jared Ashcraft.
• Absence of Visual by Dan Kogai.
• Forbidden? by omni 鳥頭.
• Extra points by 八雲アナグラ.
• Also includes grammars by Pete Keen.
• Progress next week by 八雲アナグラ.
• Changed name by nil2.
• Name stayed the same by 重城良国.
• First Lecture by perlzemi.
• Cyrillically Upper by Antonio Nikishaev.
• Close to Academia by 八雲アナグラ.
• Cloned anew by parv.
• Testing Raku online by Marc Chantreux.
• Doing it in Raku! by Jan Halsema.

Meanwhile on Facebook

If you’re interested in developments there, go the Perl 6 group homepage.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Useless use of constant value by ToddAndMargo.
• Words and separators question by ToddAndMargo.
• GTK for Windows by ToddAndMargo.
• Tip: Windows Perl6 zef required git by ToddAndMargo.
• Quoting issue in Windows by ToddAndMargo.

Comments about Raku

• Not very high threading performance by StefanKarpinski.
• No transition in the end by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Static site generator? by jjjbokma.
• Trying in Raku by samebchase.
• Also nice? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Full Circle by Ralph Mellor.
• Sorely missed by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Language features by Ralph Mellor.
• More Geeky Advent Calendars by EditorDavid.
• No refcounting by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Put off, or? by Ralph Mellor.
• Phasers to cleanup by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

New Raku Modules

• Kind by Ben Davies.

Updated Raku Modules

• LibXML by David Warring.
• Gnome::Glib, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.
• Method::Also by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Math::FFT::Libfftw3 by Fernando Santagata.
• HTML::BoreDOM, Operator::dB by Owen Allsop.
• HTTP::Headers, HTTP::Supply by Sterling Hanenkamp.

Winding down

And there it is, a new Rakudo Compiler release of the Raku Programming Language. Whee! A lot of things happening in the past week, when the release got unblocked. Looks like a lot of things are going to happen this week as well: potentially 15 Raku blog posts, to start with. Hope you’ll all find time for all this goodness. Check in again next week for more reports on those goodies!