It’s a sad moment in time when you realize that basically all conferences have been cancelled for the foreseeable future: the Perl and Raku Conference in Houston, Perl & Raku Con in Amsterdam to name but a few. Some organizers even came to the conclusion that organizing “in person” events is no longer a viable business model (/r/perl comments).

The Perl Foundation has taken the initiative to organize a Conference in the Cloud in 2020. Thomas Klausner is thinking about more virtual events. Together with Gabor Szabo they will be organizing a Mob Programming session. Time will tell whether this is really a viable alternative, but for now I guess it’s the only alternative that is available to us.

Even more COVID-19 perspectives

In the past week, Andrew Shitov continued adding statistical perspectives to the Covid-19 Observer, and blogged about computing the number of recoveries. And in the meantime still found time to publish Chapter 6 of their compiler book.

In Memoriam

Elizabeth Mattijsen added an “in memoriam” file to the Rakudo distribution, in honour of the contributors who are no longer among us.

Renaming Progress

Weekly Challenge

The Raku entries for Challenge #53:

• Weekly Challenge #53 by Luca Ferrari.
• Vowelled Matrix with Raku by Arne Sommer.
• Rotate Matrix and Vowel Strings by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Weekly Challenge #53 by Javier Luque.
• Vowel Strings and Matrix Rotation by Ryan J. Thompson.
• Weekly Challenge #53 by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Weekly Challenge #53 by Shahed Nooshmand.
• Weekly Challenge #53 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.

Challenge #54 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Jonathan Worthington made OnStackReplacement work for frames that have an invokewithcapture in it, and fixed an issue with named parameter validation with regards to possible optimizations. They also made sure that every regex will get its own lexical $/, solving various edge cases. And standardized the error message on out-of-bounds code points.
• Daniel Green fixed various memory leaks.
• Stefan Seifert also did their share fixing potential segfaults and memory leaks related to NativeCall and optimized internal string handling.
• Jan-Olof Hendig spotted a missing break statement, that made some potential optimizations impossible.
• Patrick Böker made make clean clean up more in NQP.
• Ben Davies fixed various Parameter.raku issues, and removed some unnecessary symbol creation.
• And a number of smaller fixes, optimisations and other improvements.

Questions about Raku

• Named regex fails capture by hsmyers.
• Custom operator to suppress sink context by Holli.
• Check if a string contains a substring. Additionally, get index and number of match by Tinmarino.
• How to remove duplicates items in list by Tinmarino.
• Parse from String and convert to float, integer by Tinmarino.
• What is the difference? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Check if a list is empty by Tinmarino.
• Passing an array by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Convert a string to list of hexadecimal of each byte by Tinmarino.
• What’s wrong with this regex? bu Mohammad S Anwar.
• Remove some characters from a string by index by Tinmarino.
• Merge Hash by Tinmarino.
• Replacement for cloc? by mr_clicky_keys.
• How can you write a module for a role group? by Ben Davies.
• Rational numbers by milou123.
• Diving into Raku by daniellionel.
• How to make a list of 2-element lists into a hash? by vonbrand.
• Testing with a metaoperator doesn’t print the test description by Fernando Santagata.
• The easiest? by Haitamdragon.
• Raku on Cygwin by sudo-batman.
• Why is there such a large performance difference between these two scrips that do the same thing? by jmcneirney.
• A question about Grammars by s-ro_mojosa.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• More than one way to lint it by Alexey Melezhik.
• Explained infix by Kang-min Liu.
• The wonderfulness that is multi dispatch by Simon Proctor.
• Has it been released? by k-ten.
• Released or renamed? by takuro.
• Absolute freedom by Alexey Melezhik.
• Working and up-to-date by Suman Khanal🇳🇵.
• Print the lockdown by Samuel Chase.
• An essay of tech conferences by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Don’t roll your own by Ben Davies.
• Thanks everyone by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Amazingly beautiful by Mohammad S Anwar.
• It’s a breeze by Suman Khanal🇳🇵.
• The power of expression by Dr. Roy Schestowitz (罗伊).
• Applying a regex to a complex structure by Andreas Mueller.
• Hoping for a rebirth by Quinn Norton.
• In day … by Samuel Chase.
• Set of questions by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Just use … by Zed A. Shaw, Writer.
• Missed that by Paul Bütow.
• Also cancelled… by The Perl Shop.
• Changed before? by Takana Norimasa.

Comments about Raku

• Reasons for not being fast by Brad Gilbert.
• The Osborne effect by pjc50.
• Influence by Perl by xeeeeeeeeeeenu.
• A variety of strategies by Ralph Mellor.
• Turned out to be real by onion2k.
• More on grammars by Ralph Mellor.
• Being told to write by kick.
• Fix the errors by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Painted your idea by Ralph Mellor.
• Repeating the split by beefhash.
• Navigate the entire spectrum by nicoburns.

New Raku Modules

• Colorizable by Luis F. Uceta.
• Date::Discordian by thundergnat.
• Concurrent::PChannel by Vadim Belman.
• Today by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Data::Record by Ben Davies.

Updated Raku Modules

• P5pack by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Termbox by José Joaquín Atria.
• AttrX::Mooish by Vadim Belman.
• Math::Libgsl::Matrix by Fernando Santagata.
• Path::Router by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• Crypt::CAST5 by Ben Davies.
• Algorithm::LDA by Itsuki Toyota.

Winding down

It looks like we won’t have a 2020.03 Rakudo Compiler release: some last minute problems may mean that some recent architectural changes will need to be revisited for this implementation of the Raku Programming Language. And in other thoughts: stay safe, stay healthy and may your hacking be educational. See you again next week for another issue of the Rakudo Weekly News!