Patrick Böker lets us know that rakudobrew (originally by Tadeusz Sośnierz) has been re-imagined as rakubrew and that it is ready for testing! It allows one to have multiple versions of different Raku implementations installed in parallel and switch between them. It’s a perlbrew and plenv look-alike and supports both flavours of commands. An excellent tool for Raku module developers!

More from FOSDEM

The booklet that so quickly dissipated from the FOSDEM stand in Brussels, can now be downloaded for your perusal: 64 pages with introductions, book extracts and more (made with support of The Perl Foundation and the Enlightened Perl Organisation)! Wendy van Dijk made a lot of pictures when visiting Brussels for FOSDEM. And JJ Merelo‘s presentation at FOSDEM can now be seen/heard (at typical FOSDEM quality).

German Perl and Raku Workshop

There are some exciting Raku presentations lined up for the 22nd German Perl and Raku Workshop, this time in Erlangen on 4, 5, 6 March.

• Cro HTTP router essentials by Jonathan Worthington.
• Data Science with Perl and Raku by Sören Laird Sörries (German).
• Realizing Raku macros by Jonathan Worthington.
• Raku rules and grammar tutorial by Jonathan Worthington.
• A strategy for Perl and Raku by Herbert Breunung (German).

And it’s not too late to submit your talk proposal! Yours truly should really get on that after writing this Rakudo Weekly News.

A Swiss Treat

Just a week after the German Raku and Perl Workshop, Damian Conway will be giving a free 2-hour Raku workshop in Lausanne, Switzerland: On the shoulders of Giants: 400 Years of Raku on the morning of 12 March! Followed by the API Design for Programmers workshop in the afternoon. And if you didn’t have enough of it yet, the next day (13 March) will be a whole day workshop titled Better Coding Practices. All highly recommended!

If you’re more interested in improving your technical presentation skills, then Damian has something for you as well: 3 whole day workshops about Core Techniques, Design and Delivery Skills and Persuasive Speaking. Hint: Raku could use more persuasive speakers!

A new raku.org website

Siavash Askari Nasr has been working on an alternate version of the raku.org website: you can see it in action (for now). You can leave any comments in the associated problem-solving issue. Many kudos to Siavash!

Expressing Events

Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira of Red fame, has started brainstorming / prototyping a new slang for describing events and how to handle them, allowing a more descriptive rather than a programmatic model. An exciting idea for making Raku even more generally applicable for all sorts of situations. Comments welcome!

Some Dude

An extensive blog post by Some Dude discusses whether Perl is still worth learning now. It also mentions Raku a bit, and Raku also comes up in the /r/perl comments by the usual suspects.

Squashathon

Not a lot of people worked on this weekend’s squashathon. So it looks like it will need some thought on how to actually get people to join in on something like that. More about that in future instalments of the Rakudo Weekly News.

Renaming Progress

Weekly Challenge

The Raku entries for Challenge #46:

• Garbled Message and Room Open by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• The Cryptic Raku Room by Arne Sommer.
• Weekly Challenge #46 by Javier Luque
• Cryptic Message and Is the Room Open? (500 Doors) by Ryan C. Thompson.
• Encoded messages and open rooms by Luca Ferrari.
• Is the room open? by Noud Aldenhoven (HackerNews comments).
• Weekly Challenge #46 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.

Challenge #47 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Jonathan Worthington fixed an issue with the serialization of autogenerated protos. They also fixed made sure that the . in <.[x]> in a regular expression is always a no-op.
• Jan-Olof Hendig upgraded MoarVM to work with libuv 1.34.2.
• Daniel Green fixed some libtommath 1.2.0 issues in MoarVM, one of which was stopping a memory leak.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added set/unset methods to SetHash, and add/remove methods to BagHash. And they made various aspects of Date and DateTime handling a bit to a lot faster.
• Ben Davies continued their work on supporting Unix sockets.
• Bahtiar Gadimov provided many Pod::To::Text related fixes.
• And some smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Raku

• Implementing AT-POS to return an object instead of a list of things by uzlxxxx.
• Raku rebless and multiple classes by Arne Sommer.
• Confusion about lists contained in an aggregate, maybe context problem? by Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ 迪拉.
• Best way to start on macOS? by sigzero.
• How can I timeout a promise? by jja.
• Question about lust assignment with lists and scalars by TentacleYuri.
• Difficulty when constructing a nested data structure by jja.
• Inspect regex made with a variable by Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ 迪拉.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Showcase your module! by The Perl And Raku Conference.
• Thanks! by Dylan Hardison.
• Experience timtowdi by B1ff B1ff.
• Install openssl with Sparrow6 by Alexey Melezhik.
• Is it working? by あおの.
• An elite haxor? by Jonathan Picazo.
• Introducing… by The Perl Shop.
• On Scala3 by po.
• Disputing by Keid (ケイ) 🔥ただのWebエンジニア.
• Renamed? by Keid (ケイ) 🔥ただのWebエンジニア.
• Only at compile time by RakuistIO.
• Fingers crossed! by JJ Merelo.
• Not updated since March by Yusuke Wada.
• Grow your network by The Perl And raku Conference.
• A good excuse by Marc Chantreux.
• A comeback by Ruben de Groot (hacktor).
• Vintage computer tour by Ann Barcomb.
• Redesigned Comma by Ljutke Čap.
• Test your Raku distribution by Alexey Melezhik.
• What happened? by Nadim Kobeissi.
• Relaxing and submitting by The Perl and Raku Conference.
• Better still by MaMo.
• Frigging slow by Hans-J. Schmid.
• An idea by Brian Wisti.
• Unordered hashes by Juan Manuel.
• Perl, 6 by Clinton Gormley.
• Gitlab projects support! by Alexey Melezhik.
• Will extensions change? by エヌユル.
• Not so troublesome by エヌユル.
• Too late? by Takuro SASAKI＠技術書典-1日目.
• Twice as fast! by 奈良阪まぞく@VRChat Profile.

Comments about Raku

• On refinements by Ralph Mellor.
• Do me for now by Ralph Mellor.
• Roles resembling typeclasses by imiric.
• Making it easy to learn by Ralph Mellor.
• Static and dynamic constraints by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• LLVM by alan.invents.
• Email::SendGrid by Jonathan Worthington.
• Text::Diff, Test::Differences by Rod Taylor.
• Linux::Joystick by thundergnat.

Updated Raku Modules

• Sparrow6, Sparrowdo, by Alexey Melezhik.
• Term::Choose by Matthäus Kiem.
• Hash::Merge by Patrick Spek.
• Auth::SASL by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• Math::Libgsl::Constants, Math::Libgsl::Matrix by Fernando Santagata.
• Pretty::Table by Luis F. Uceta.
• License::SPDX by Jonathan Stowe.
• HTML::Boredom, Operator::dB by Owen Allsopp.

Winding down

A windy time for the Raku Programming Language! Well, not really. More like steadily steaming ahead! While Ciara is still doing her thing outside, it gives a great incentive to stay indoors and do some hacking. Hoping that everybody reading this Rakudo Weekly News will only be blown away by its contents! So see you next week for more, fresh news!