Vadim Belman as the headliner once again? Well, last week the news was that their work on roles of the past months was merged. This week, they blogged extensively about it! With a little introduction on how they got to work on this part of Raku, how it works with language versioning, and the introduction of the Rolified MRO. If you’re into Raku roles, a must read!

Perl and Raku Conference 2020 Amsterdam

Reserve the following dates for the Perl and Raku Conference in Amsterdam: 10 – 14 August 2020! With workshops on Monday and Tuesday, including a beginners workshop included in the price of a standard ticket (/r/rakulang, /r/perl comments) .

Adventing continued!

Official Raku Advent Calendar:

• Day 17 – Maze Maker for Fun by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Day 18 – What is my concurrent or parallel Raku program doing? by Jonathan Worthington.
• Day 19 – Functional Programming with Raku by Simon Proctor (/r/rakulang comments).
• Day 20 – Raku from Perl: Transforming Old Perl Code (Part 2) by Tom Browder.
• Day 21 – Searching for a Red gift by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Day 22 – Off Course by Arne Sommer (/r/rakulang comments).
• Day 23 – A Raku Advent Helper by Tom Browder.
• Day 24 – The Grinch of Raku, Part 2 – Hold Your Horses by Ben Davies (/r/rakulang comments).

Sterling Hanenkamp‘s Async & Concurrency Advent:

• Day 17 – Comparing react with tap
• Day 18 – Supply Back Pressure
• Day 19 – Thread Safe Structures Without Locking
• Day 20 – Breaking Down Concurrency Problems
• Day 21 – Parallel Loop Execution
• Day 22 – Asynchronous Socket
• Day 23 – Asynchronous Locking
• Day 24 – Asynchronous Inter-Process Communication

Weekly Challenge Advent (the ones with Raku content):

• Day 17 – Bitcoin Validation by Athanasius.
• Day 19 – Strip Leading Zeros by Khalid.
• Day 20 – Word Game by Roger Bell West.
• Day 22 – Replace Character and Count by JJ Merelo.
• Day 23 – Perfect Numbers by Francis J Whittle.
• Day 24 – Niven Numbers by Jo Christian Oterhals.

Renaming Progress

• Jonathan Worthington speaks his mind about the renaming process and many other subjects in an extensive interview. A very interesting read!
• Jonathan Stowe reports that the first batch of renaming of their modules is now done.
• Thanks to unclechu for a reminder, there’s now a configured Matrix community for Raku: +raku:matrix.org . Feel free to join it (let Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev know if you need an invite)
• H Merijn Brand has renamed the canary in the coalmine benchmark to Raku.

Grant Report

Jonathan Worthington provided a status report on the Perl Foundation Development Performance and Reliability Grant for the period April-December 2019.

Red:api<2>

Fernando Correa de Oliveira announces a new version of Red, an ORM for Raku. If you like to have Raku take care of your database queries, then Red is your thing.

To yours truly’s knowledge, this is also the first time that the :api<> feature is used in an ecosystem module. This allows a user to select a module for loading based on its API version, rather than on its distribution version. Allowing older code to use a module’s older API, and newer code to use a module’s newer API, in the same installation, and in the same program.

Oops, some oversight

Looks like yours truly missed some news items the past weeks that were mentioned on the #raku IRC channel using notable6‘s weekly: feature. So a lot less eggnog for yours truly the coming days. So here’s what was missed:

• Clifton Wood wants to create at least an initial list of objectives for a Raku web framework.
• A new bot is now on the #raku IRC-channels: sourceable6! It’s the next generation of SourceBaby that allows easy searching of the Raku core code. (see examples). A big thanks to Alexander Kiryuhin for the initial whateverablized version.

Weekly Challenge

Here are the Raku entries for Challenge #39:

• Guest House And Reverse Polish Notation by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Reverse Polish Guest Book, Raku Edition by Arne Sommer.
• Weekly Challenge #39 by Javier Luque
• Reverse Polish by Ryan C. Thompson.

The Weekly Challenge Champion this week is Ryan C. Thompson. And there was a Raku Solutions Review by Laurent Rosenfeld. Of course, Challenge #40 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert fixed another set of potential segfaults with NativeCall callbacks in combination with Garbage Collection and de-optimizations.
• Vadim Belman fixed the nqp runner script on the JVM backend. They also fixed enums on v6.e.PREVIEW, the order in which DESTROY methods are called, and several new role related issues.
• Alexander Kiryuhin fixed a problem with EVAL while working on the 2019.12 Rakudo Compiler Release.
• And a few smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Raku

• Can native attributes be used as bind target in parameters? by JJ Merelo.
• Reduction meta-operator inconsistency by ikarpenis.
• Can Raku many a huge impact within online software? by Envrin.
• How can you write a customizable grammar? by Ben Davies.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Crazy to still have these traps by Marc Chantreux.
• Programming Language of the Future by JCC-1701-D 🥑.
• Dying by Watson Ladd.
• The Future by Joaquín Ferrero.
• Obvious syntax works by Marc Chantreux.
• TIL by Stefan Scholl.
• On Steroids by Mathias Maelle.
• Abandoned? by careline.
• CFP open for TPCiH by Perl Conferences.
• Most annoying by Jonathan Stowe.
• On Versioning by Marc Chantreux.
• Raku conferences in US? by parv.
• Precious by Alex Balhatchet.
• More smoothly by Chloe Kek.
• Computer theme decoration by @doomyflo@framapiaf.
• Extreme level of geekiness by Stephanie Clark.
• Reasonable? by たにさんどっとねっと.
• No floats! by chainfailure.
• No More! by badscrew.
• Waiting for a version by Barry Rowlingson🐺.
• Private joke by Marc Chantreux.
• What the ^ is doing by Ben Davies.
• An exit from loops by Chris Olive.
• About Red:api<2> by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Comma makes the list by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• First for next year by Raku programming language newsfeed.
• All distributions by Chloe Kek.
• End up like Perl 6? by Martina Krung.
• Try out Tomty! by Alexey Melezhik.
• Still way to go by JJ Merelo.
• Moving along nicely by 🐜💩💛.
• Language specification? by Makoto Hasegawa.
• Changing targets by Jonathan Stowe.
• What is your code doing? by The Perl Shop.
• Accepting Master Class Proposals by Perl Conferences.
• Inside Docker Containers by सुमन खनाल🇳🇵.
• Azure Pipelines by सुमन खनाल🇳🇵.
• As string delimiters by eater 🥰.
• Still allowed? by Ludo Tolhurst-Cleaver.
• A gem by ぅち🍒舞いっちんぐ.
• Evil inspiration by Ben Davies.

Meanwhile on Facebook

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

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• OAuth2 by ToddAndMargo.
• USE’ing a symlinked module causes a MOAR error by Richard Hainsworth.
• Is LibraryMake still current? by Fernando Santagata.
• Stack Exchange by ToddAndMargo.

Comments about Raku

• Weird interests by E.E. Smith.
• Symbols? by Ralph Mellor.
• Similar aspects by Ralph Mellor.
• Duke Nukem Forever by jlg23.
• Interesting idea by Ralph Mellor.
• Scope features by Ralph Mellor.
• Still too slow by petre.
• Take and return a single value by Ralph Mellor.
• Many meanings by Ralph Mellor.
• Arbitrary predicates by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• AVL-Tree, RakuAdvent::WordPress by Tom Browder.
• Crypt::SodiumScrypt, Crypt::AnyPasswordHash by Jonathan Stowe.
• Math::Libgsl by Fernando Santagata.
• Getopt::Subcommands by Leon Timmermans.

Updated Raku Modules

• Chart::Gnuplot, Algorithm::LibSVM, MeCab, Random::Choice by Itsuki Toyota.
• Crypt::Libcrypt, RedX::HashedPassword, JSON::Class, License::SPDX, Sys::Utmp, Sys::Lastlog, Linux::Fuser, Linux::Cpuinfo, GDBM by Jonathan Stowe.
• Kind::Subset::Parametric by Ben Davies.
• Text::Utils, Date::Names, Net::IP by Tom Browder.
• P5getpwnam, Method::Also by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• CSS::Selector::To::XPath by David Warring.
• FindBin by Steven Lembark.
• Terminal::Spinners by ryn1x.

Winding down

Wow, what a flurry of new and updated modules! So good to see!

This was the last issue of the Rakudo Weekly News…. in 2019 :-). The next issue of the Rakudo Weekly News will be published on 6 January 2020.

Wishing all readers a relaxing, enjoyable and safe Holiday Season! See you all next year for more news about the Raku Programming Language and its community!