Vadim Belman has extensively reviewed the way Roles work in Raku, and came to the conclusion that quite a lot of work would need to be done on them to make them fully accessible and malleable from a MOP perspective. And they did that lot of work. This work of the past months has now been merged. Kudos to Vadim Belman for this extensive and intricate work!

The first 100

Stuart J Mackintosh has blogged about his first 100 days as president of The Perl Foundation, in which he touches on the renaming process and the future of Perl and Raku.

Adventing continued!

Official Raku Advent Calendar:

• Day 10 – A Teaser by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Day 11 – Packaging with Libarchive by Curt Tilmes.
• Day 12 – Making a simple bot by Patrick Spek.
• Day 13 – A Little R&R by tmtvl.
• Day 14 – Thinking Beyond Types: an Introduction to Rakudo’s MOP by Ben Davies.
• Day 15 – Santa had too much eggnog by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.
• Day 16 – Raku powered jmp-ing to the coalface by Nigel Hamilton.

Sterling Hanenkamp‘s Async & Concurrency Advent:

• Day 10 – The Divide and Conquer Pattern
• Day 11 – Parallel Map-Reduce Pattern
• Day 12 – Keep Your Thread or Don’t
• Day 13 – The Monitor Pattern
• Day 14 – Compare-and-swap Your Scalars
• Day 15 – Breaking Down Async Problems
• Day 16 – Semaphores

Weekly Challenge Advent (the ones with Raku content):

• Day 10 – Split on change of character by Mark Senn.
• Day 12 – Nth Order Difference Series by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Day 14 – Pascal Triangle by Simon Proctor.
• Day 15 – Dynamic Variable by Javier Luque.

Andrew Shitov’s A Language a Day advent:

• Day 11 – Raku at a glance (/r/rakulang comments)

Renaming Progress

• The “perl6” tag on StackOverflow has been replaced by “raku“. There are now 1260 Raku questions (with most of them answered 🙂
• The PERL6_EXCEPTIONS_HANDLER environment variable is now deprecated, please use the RAKU_EXCEPTIONS_HANDLER environment variable instead.

Rewriting Legacy Code

Jeff Goff has continued his series of blog posts about porting OLE::Storage_Lite with another blog post: Rewriting Perl code for Raku Part V.

Weekly Challenge

Here are the Raku entries for Challenge #38:

• Date Finder and Word Game by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Datefinder General. A Raku Wordgame by Arne Sommer.
• Weekly Challenge #38 by Javier Luque

Of course, Challenge #39 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Vadim Belman and Paweł Murias worked on jar configuration issues in the build process on the JVM backend.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen deprecated the PERL6_EXCEPTIONS_HANDLER environment variable for the RAKU_EXCEPTIONS_HANDLER environment variable (which, e.g. allows exceptions to be thrown as JSON).
• And a few smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Raku

• Finding the contiguous sequences of equal elements in a list by Lars Malmsteen.
• Cloning multidimensional arrays by ikarpenis.
• Calling GSL functions via NativeCall throws error by Suman Khanal.
• Why does a single number fail to match a Range object in an array? by chenyf.
• How to restrict match method to capture group? by con.
• How to name a constraint by Richard Hainsworth.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Feeling the pain by Marc Chantreux.
• No more tail-calling by Raphael McSinyx.
• Forgot about it by irxground 💎🦀.
• Four lines of Raku by The Perl Shop.
• Still incrementing the xx? by Andy Smith.
• Crochet! by @doomyflo@framapiaf.
• Isn’t it as easy as… by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• A List of Pairs, not a Hash by Ben Davies.
• TPCiH Newsletter #2 by Perl Conferences.
• Pursue? by xatier@命短し飲め飲め乙女リクリ.
• CPAN equivalent? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Like Perl 6? by ShellCore.
• Matches what I expect by Marc Chantreux.
• Talking about Raku at FOSDEM by JJ Merelo.
• What is this Raku? by Rainer Joswig.
• Second chapter by JJ Merelo.
• Loving the expressiveness! by pavan racherla.
• Wondering why by Jonathan Stowe.
• No other language like it by pavan racherla.
• First Japanese Raku book! by 八雲アナグラ.
• Nobody told me? by Patrick Thomson.

Meanwhile on Facebook

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

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• My unicode keeper by ToddAndMargo.
• Modules and Subsets by ToddAndMargo.
• About use v6.d by MT.
• Cannot invoke this object (REPR: Null; VMNull) by Paul Procacci.
• Square root question by ToddAndMargo.

Comments about Raku

• Password generator by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Less of a learning curve by proverbialbunny.
• No longer a 5 / 6 thing by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• On Adverbs by Ralph Mellor.
• Basically a subroutine by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

New Raku Modules

• Kind::Subset::Parametric by Ben Davies.

Updated Raku Modules

• Gnome::Gdk3, Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::N, BSON by Marcel Timmerman.
• AttrX::Mooish by Vadim Belman.
• HTML::Canvas, PDF::Font::Loader, LibXML, PDF::ISO_32000 by David Warring.

Winding down

Again a bit of a quiet week with regards to core developments, with a lot of people either writing their advent post, or reading the many advent posts. But still some people work hard on making the Raku Programming Language even better during the period!

PSA: the next issue of the Rakudo Weekly will be published early on 24 December, rather than 23 December. That will be the last issue of 2019. The first issue of 2020 of the Rakudo Weekly News will be published on 6 January.