Jonathan Stowe announced a long overdue migration to the Raku era of their NoiseGang portal, a group for the promotion and support of audio and music application development. Definitely a place to check out if you’re into making music using your computer!

Another Rakudo Star!

It has taken quite some time, but finally, a new Rakudo Star (2020.01) has been made available by Patrick Spek (many kudos!). This now provides a new entry point for entry-level users of Raku.

Another Rakudo Compiler Release!

Alexander Kiryuhin released the second edition of the Rakudo Compiler this year: release #134 (2020.02). However, there appears to be an issue with one of the libraries that MoarVM needs on the Alpine distribution: this is holding up the creation of Linux packages at the moment of this writing.

Rakudist Update

Alexey Melezhik shows how you can test command line applications using Tomty and Rakudist. And as always, they’re interested in feedback, ideas and comments!

New tag line?

JJ Atria came up with a very nice way of describing Raku on Twitter:

🦋 #rakulang is the language I never knew I always wanted

— JJ Atria (@jjatria) February 20, 2020

which yours truly rephrased as “Raku, the language you never knew you always wanted“. Perhaps we should put this on T-shirts and stuff!

Design flaws

Ogniloud wants to know about what people think are design flaws of Raku. This created a nice thread on Reddit, and some remarks on Twitter.

Renaming Progress

Weekly Challenge

The Raku entries for Challenge #48:

• Survivors and Palindrome Dates by Luca Ferrari.
• Surviving Dates with Raku by Arne Sommer.
• Survivor and Palindrom Dates by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Weekly Challenge #48 by Javier Luque.
• My first Date with Raku by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Survivor (Josepheus problem) and Palindrome Dates (mm/dd/yyyy) by Ryan C. Thompson.

Ryan C. Thompson also did reviews of Raku solutions to Challenge #046 and Raku solutions to Challenge #047. And Challenge #49 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Jonathan Worthington fixed a handle leak with Proc::Async and fixed mixing in functionality into the Raku grammar.
• Stefan Seifert streamlined the MoarVM release process. They also wrote a patch to fix a problem related to native nums and JITting (spotted by Peter du Marchie van Voorthuysen on the Windows backend) and improved dependency checking during pre-compilation.
• Daniel Green fixed a potential memory corruption issue on some failure paths, and improved static optimization of Junctions.
• Patrick Böker allowed Rakudo to run on Unicode paths on Windows again and worked on solving issues with continuous testing on CircleCI.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed some recently introduced issues with Date / DateTime and supplied a work-around for a crash in stress-testing Lock::Async. They also fixed an issue in containerization of Attribute default values and implemented index($string,@needles) / rindex($string,@needles) functionality.
• Vadim Belman fixed the is rw trait on classes and roles.
• Peter du Marchie van Voorthuysen improved the performance of Seq listification.
• And many smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Raku

• Using captured types to type a class’s attributes by uzlxxxx.
• Question about roles, writable containers and everything in between by uzluisf.
• Error “emit without supply or react” when tapping IO::Notifications by JJ Merelo.
• How do I bundle the C source in a Raku distribution that uses NativeCall? by jja.
• Is there a SUPER fast way to turn an array into a string without the spaces separating the elements? by lisprogtor.
• “Too few positionals passed” in arg-less method with type captures by JJ Merelo.
• “Invocant of method ‘ASSIGN-KEY’ must be an object instance” when using assignment operator by Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ 迪拉斯.
• Is there a fast method to find and remove/replace non-ASCII or malformed utf8 characters? by lisprogtor.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Adding to class later by エヌユル.
• Raku could by Steve Scaffidi.
• Another dev room? by JJ Merelo.
• Surprisingly broken by Jonathan Stowe.
• Raku can do it by Herbert Bollermann.
• Great! by エヌユル.
• A grammar for syslog entries by JJ Merelo.
• Stop using the official by JJ Merelo.
• First full Raku dist by JJ Merelo.
• Language for complex event patterns by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• A thing of beauty by Lorefnon.
• Eject as an adverb by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Going into hiding by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Going on forever by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Early bird pricing for TP&RCiH by The Perl and Raku Conference.
• Spanish Raku guide by Emanuel.
• Port-knocking by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• Just Beautiful by JJ Merelo.
• Where was it? by 聖@冷たい水をくださいできたらマスクをください.
• Completely changed? by 聖@冷たい水をくださいできたらマスクをください.
• Having to pay 0.00 by Joelle Maslak.
• Also useful day to day? by Nils Magnus.
• It’s OK to brag by Timo Paulssen.
• Command line tools made easy by Salve J. Nilsen.
• Missed the debacle by Rick Tunnicliffe.
• The Most Ever by JJ Merelo.
• Tilde concatenates by がーねっと＠自作言語制作者.
• Awesome Audrey by オスツ🍣.
• Closer to the speed of Perl by Tao Wang Lan UTSW.
• Less traction by Josh Conway.
• No construction by msk.
• Swiss Raku and Perl Community Meetup by Raku Programming Language Newsfeed.
• A Raku Liquidsoap Image by Jonathan Stowe.
• Remembrance by terazzo.
• There’s Apocalypses by Justin Falcone.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• PCRE -> Raku RE by Paul Procacci.

Comments about Raku

• Designed and implemented by bmn__
• Lies, damn lies and benchmarks by Ralph Mellor.
• Meaning to give it a spin by samatman.
• Lambda’s in Raku by Ralph Mellor.
• Not as far as Lisp by Ralph Mellor.
• Lambda literal syntax by xybre.
• Perhaps cro? by Ralph Mellor.
• Has it changed much? by bloopernova.
• Structure and match patterns distinct? by Ralph Mellor.
• No significant mindshare by kamaal.
• On nested data matching by Ralph Mellor.
• Worse for shell-like tasks by chubot.
• Ignoring by badsectoracula.
• Solution to identity crisis by FillarMillmore.

New Raku Modules

• Math::Libgsl::Polynomial by Fernando Santagata.
• HTTP::API::MusicBrainz by Patrick Spek.
• Syslog::Parse by JJ Merelo.
• Supply::Folds by Ben Davies.

Updated Raku Modules

• Math::Libgsl::Combination, Math::Libgsl::Complex, Math::Libgsl::Elementary, Math::Libgsl::Multiset, Math::Libgsl::Matrix, Math::Libgsl::Permutation, Math::Libgsl::Sort, Math::Libgsl::BLAS by Fernando Santagata.
• unprint by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Text::VimColour by Konrad Bucheli.
• Pg::Notify, Audio::Liquidsoap by Jonathan Stowe.
• Email::MIME by Rod Taylor.
• Term::Choose::Util by Matthäus Kiem.
• PDF::Class, PDF::Font::Loader by David Warring.
• Gnome::Gio, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Getopt::Long by Leon Timmermans.

Winding down

Wow. So much happening in one week of the Raku Programming Language! Good to see bunch of new modules, module updates, compiler releases, progress on a new Raku book. I’m hoping next week will not be a disappointment!