Patrick Spek has made the first release candidate of Rakudo Star 2019.11 available for download. If you are working with Raku from Rakudo Star distributions, then this is the moment to test the distribution so that you can be sure that nothing was missed! So please, download and test it! Which of course you can also do if you’re not generally a user of Rakudo Star 🙂

Adventing continued!

Official Raku Advent Calendar:

• Day 3 – Stack Frame Reduction by tmtvl.
• Day 4 – Not Tripping Over Tripcodes by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• Day 5 – Modular Raku Command Line Apps by Simon Proctor.
• Day 6 – Put some (GitHub) Actions in your Raku (repositories) by JJ Merelo.
• Day 7 – Parsing Firefox’ user.js with Raku (Part 1) by Patrick Spek.
• Day 8 – Parsing Firefox’ user.js with Raku (Part 2) by Patrick Spek.
• Day 9 – A chain (or Russian doll) of containers by JJ Merelo.

Sterling Hanenkamp‘s Async & Concurrency Advent:

• Day 3 – Supply blocks
• Day 4 – Channels
• Day 5 – Threads
• Day 6 – Raku Schedulers
• Day 7 – React blocks
• Day 8 – The Lock Class
• Day 9 – Atomic Integers

Weekly Challenge Advent (the ones with Raku content):

• Day 3 – Decimal to Roman by Joelle Maslak.
• Day 6 – Pythagoras Pie Puzzle by Arne Sommer.
• Day 7 – The Ackermann Function by Jaldhar H. Vyas.

Renaming Progress

• It looks like Google is starting to pick up Raku, but it can still be made better when you fix your links to the documentation.

Rewriting Legacy Code

Jeff Goff has continued his series of blog posts about porting OLE::Storage_Lite with two blog posts: The Sorceror and A New Hope!

The future of SparrowHub

Alexey Melezhik is inviting feedback about the future of SparrowHub (the central repository for Sparrow plugins).

Weekly Challenge

Here are the Raku entries for Challenge #37:

• Weekdays in Each Month and Daylight Gain / Loss by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Weekdays, Daylight and Raku by Arne Sommer.
• Weekly Challenge #37 by Javier Luque, who also happens to be this week’s champion.

Of course, Challenge #38 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Code by Ben Davies for the networking grant, got merged into MoarVM master.
• Support for ‘−’ (U+2212) got added to nqp::radix on MoarVM (by Elizabeth Mattijsen) and the JVM / Javascript backends (by Paweł Murias).
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made Str.parse-base between 5.5x and 9x faster.
• Patrick Böker made sure that errors on git submodule updates are not silently swallowed.
• And a few smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Raku

• Can’t inherit a method trait from a class defined in the same file by yguillemot.
• How do I iterate through an array inside a hash? by Digicrat.
• Elegant way to find repeated digits by mscha.
• How to initialize a fixed array to a value by Javi.
• Why does Raku perform so bad with multidimensional arrays? by Javi.
• Can’t post JSON data to GitHub API (and probably others) by JJ Merelo.
• Create GitHub actions that use powershell scripts by JJ Merelo.
• Using void structs via NativeCall by JJ Merelo.
• How do I restrict the values allowed in a variable? by Todd.
• Cro run throwing connection reset by peer by Abeer.
• Operator overloading by hsmyers.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• A brief look at Julia by Andrew Shitov.
• On permanent infrastructure by JJ Merelo.
• Atomically safe by JJ Merelo.
• Misunderstood by Ryoma Sin’ya@令和元年.
• Kotlin at a glance by Andrew Shitov.
• Running a container for 2019.11 by JJ Merelo.
• Not stale by Alexey Melezhik.
• Modern C++ at a glance by Andrew Shitov.
• Forgot by Gold.Holk.
• Powershell and actions by JJ Merelo.
• Crystal at a glance by Andrew Shitov.
• It’s got elves by Simon Proctor.
• Not Perl by あやふみ.
• Scala at a glance by Andrew Shitov.
• A Reminder by Stéphane Payrard.
• Officially renamed by あやふみ.
• Powerfully by JJ Merelo.
• Elegantly by Possum.
• Dart at a glance by Andrew Shitov.
• Still waiting by joerocklin.
• Golfed by Tyler Limkemann.
• An accomplishment by Stéphane Payrard.
• Reached 300 by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Now useless by John Steed.
• Still Hope by Tom Panzarella.
• Wrong image by やまいも＠技書博【3F-せ01】.
• Extremely difficult by Tom Panzarella.
• Disturbance and confusion by みぃにゃんこ.
• The origin of Raku’n’Roll by Alexey Melezhik.
• On parsing user.js by JJ Merelo.
• Hack at a glance by Andrew Shitov.
• In the same category by Thomas Junk.
• First Raku submission by Mohammad S Anwar.
• See also by Ben Charlton.
• Finally admitted by Mike Spooner.

Meanwhile on Facebook

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

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• rmdir question by ToddAndMargo.
• I need array of hashes help by ToddAndMargo.
• Restricted value passed to a sub question by ToddAndMargo.
• Where is my map typo? by ToddAndMargo.
• Hash and print question by Todd Chester.
• Vulgar? by ToddAndMargo.
• Looking for good project by Tom Blackwood.
• Modules and constants by ToddAndMargo.
• A comment on the new name change by ToddAndMargo.
• My keeper on hashes by ToddAndMargo.
• Precedence: assignment vs smartmatch? by William Michels.
• How do I do literal quotes in a regex? by ToddAndMargo.
• Raku, docs, help by Tom Browder.
• My pop ups for windows module by ToddAndMargo.
• Raku vs Julia by Tom Blackwood.
• Advent Calendar by JJ Merelo.
• Implicit type change by Marcel Timmerman.
• Pass by reference by Joseph Brenner.
• My keeper on contains by ToddAndMargo.
• A grand idea on the documentation by ToddAndMargo.

Comments about Raku

• Favorite things by amyjess.
• On graphemes and synthetic codepoints by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• By default in this case by lelf.
• Can’t remember the name by db48x.
• Any indication by rstuart4133.
• Features for governance by Ralph Mellor.
• Better Ackermann by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Kind by Ben Davies.
• Date::Calendar::CopticEthiopic by Jean Forget.
• sanity by Nick Logan.
• pixel-pick by Steve Schulze.

Updated Raku Modules

• Smack by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• LibXML by David Warring.
• File::Stat by 0racle.
• Gnome::Gdk3, Gnome::Glib, Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::N by Marcel Timmerman.
• Date::Calendar::Strftime by Jean Forget.
• MeCab by Itsuki Toyota.

Winding down

A bit of a quiet week, with a lot of people either writing their advent post, or reading the many advent posts. This will most likely stay the same this coming week. Nonetheless, yours truly advises you to check in again next week for more news about the Raku Programming Language and its community!