Sterling Hanenkamp (of Raku Async Advent fame) has written an endearing blog about their position with regards to the renaming of Perl 6 to Raku and the important things in life. (/r/rakulang comments).

Conference in Houston, TX

This year, the American Perl and Raku Conference will be held in Houston, TX from 23 to 27 June 2020: one day of tutorials before, 3 days of conference, and one day of tutorials after. You can get your Early Bird tickets now!

GSOC ideas?

JJ Merelo lets us know that it is the time of year again to come up with your ideas for this year’s Google Summer of Code, in cooperation with the Perl Foundation. So please, submit your ideas for Raku projects and discuss them!

Renaming Progress

C++ and Fortran and Raku

Andrew Shitov describes how you can easily interface your Raku program with C++, or even Fortran, even though this is generally considered to be tricky business! (/r/rakulang comments)

RakuNimRustC++

Mark Carter has compared Raku with Nim, and Rust with C++! (/r/rakulang comments).

Rakudist update

Alexey Melezhik continued his work on making it easier to continuously monitor the ecosystem for module breakage, and blogged about it!

Weekly Challenge

Laurent Rosenfeld published their review of Challenge #41. And here are the Raku entries for Challenge #42:

• Octal Numbers and Balanced Parentheses by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Octally Balanced Braces with Raku by Arne Sommer.
• Weekly Challenge #42 by Javier Luque
• Octal representation and Balanced Parentheses by Ryan C. Thompson.
• Weekly Challenge #42 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.

Challenge #43 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• ZhongnianTao fixed a potential issue in the GB18030 encoding on MoarVM.
• Daniel Green fixed some compiler warnings on MoarVM.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen improved the performance of many .raku methods, and made the Rational.base method at least 3.5x as fast. They also implemented Supply.split(Str).
• Vadim Belman fixed a problem with fully qualified parameterized roles.
• Rod Taylor fixed a problem with methods having any ENTER phasers executed twice.
• Stefan Seifert fixed a pesky issue with module dependencies being lost during pre-compilation, which was found in a production system!
• And some smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Raku

• Is it possible to interpolate Array values in token? by Pawel Pabian bbkr.
• Substring binding? by mr_clicky_keys.
• How do I assign values to CArray[WCHAR]? by Todd.
• Using a loop’s positional parameters inside an inner loop by Lars Malmsteen.
• Does NativeCall run “LocalFree( )”? by Todd.
• How to pass params to token referenced by variable? by Pawel Pabian bbkr.
• Mixing Private and Public Attributes and Accessors by p6steve.
• Using any or none on the hash keys and values by Lars Malmsteen.
• Import raku’s dir function into Perl by con.
• How to operator join two matrix by chia yi hung.
• Use of uninitialized value of type Any in numeric context by Lars Malmsteen.
• How to modify matrix by chia yi hung.
• What’s the raku analog of perl’s carp? by Joseph Brenner.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Optional static typing by Foad Sojoodi Farimani.
• Which takes precedent? by The Perl Shop.
• Another magic by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Where? by Takayuki Togo.
• Documentation ghostly by JJ Merelo.
• With multiple Postgresql databases by Alexey Melezhik.
• Sparraku! by Alexey Melezhik.
• Why no more experimenting? by Marcus Aurelius.
• Olé! by Jeff Goff.
• Been renamed by やまぐちだいすけ.
• Ain’t easy for anyone by Timo Reimann.
• Fixing in 2037 by B1ff B1ff.
• Consoling Mandelbrot by JJ Merelo.
• Today’s dose by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Can you beat this? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Enemies by Perl News.
• Peopling the booth by Jeff Goff.
• Consoling shaped arrays by JJ Merelo.
• Nice explanation by Ryoma Sin’ya@オートマトン元年.
• Whitespace delimiters? by Noah Hester.
• Learned reblessing by Jonathan Stowe.
• So cool by Travis Mattera.
• Red schema class by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• Useful at home by Joelle Maslak.
• Rivaling by The Wonder Llama.
• It exists by Kurtis McCathern.
• Raku on Discord by The Perl Shop.

Meanwhile on Facebook

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

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• My Native Call notes by ToddAndMargo.
• How do I assign values to CArray[WCHAR]? by ToddAndMargo.
• How do I convert integer to cardinal on the fly? by ToddAndMargo.
• OT: REPL, now 1002 uses! by ToddAndMargo.
• int and Str in sub declaration question by ToddAndMargo.
• type? by ToddAndMargo.
• LocalFree? by ToddAndMargo.
• Bug to report: cardinal called an integer by ToddAndMargo.
• NQPMu ?? by ToddAndMargo.
• Changing the error message from subset type violation by Joseph Brenner.
• Weirdness with subset on has by Joseph Brenner.

Comments about Raku

• Could be named differently by kazinator.
• An alternative? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Tuple syntax by Ralph Mellor.
• Your opinion? by cosmojg.
• A better reflection by peatmoss.

New Raku Modules

• OLE::Storage_Lite by Jeff Goff.
• Array::Shaped::Console by JJ Merelo.
• Auth::SASL by Sterling Hanenkamp.

Updated Raku Modules

• OO::Monitors by Jonathan Worthington.
• Desktop::Notify by Fernando Santagata.
• Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome:N, Gnome::Glib, Gnome::Gdk3, Gnome::Gtk3::Glade by Marcel Timmerman.
• Object::Permission, Object::Permission::Group by Jonathan Stowe.
• CI::Gen by Shlomi Fish.
• Red by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• File::Temp by Rod Taylor.
• LibXML, Font::FreeType by David Warring.

Winding down

The past week, yours truly has created some proposals for new functionality in Raku:

• a trait for creating accessors for private attributes (#145)
• searching for Unicode classes with Str.index and Str.rindex (#146)
• searching for more than one string with Str.index and Str.rindex (#148)

If you feel that you have something to say about these ideas, then please do! In any case, see you next week for more news about the Raku Programming Language!