Andrew Shitov has even been more busy than the past weeks. Apart from adding more and more views to the Covid-19 Observer, so many that there’s now an impressive “What’s new” page. But Andrew didn’t stop at that: an article on Perl.com titled “Observing Coronavirus Pandemic with Raku” (/r/perl comments) explains to the readers how some of the unique features of Raku were applied in processing all of the data. And in the meantime Andrew still found time to publish Chapter 7 of their compiler book.

Building modules with Nix

Chloé Kekoa explains how they developed raku-nix, a bunch of Nix code for building Raku modules, and CRAI, the Comprehensive Raku Archive Index. All to ensure reproducible builds of modules by including permanent archive URLs and cryptographic hashes. Yours truly is looking forward to where this will take the Raku ecosystem!

Thanks for being a friend

Wendy van Dijk just posted an obituary for Jeff Goff.

Renaming Progress

Weekly Challenge

The Raku entries for Challenge #54:

• Permutations and Collatz by Luca Ferrari.
• Sequential Conjectures with Raku by Arne Sommer.
• k-th Permutation Sequence and the Collatz Conjecture by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Weekly Challenge #54 by Javier Luque.
• kth Permutation and Collatz Conjecture by Ryan J. Thompson.
• Weekly Challenge #54 by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Weekly Challenge #54 by Shahed Nooshmand.
• Weekly Challenge #54 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.
• Weekly Challenge – Week 54 by Kevin Colyer.

Challenge #55 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Jonathan Worthington generalized the concept of a container descriptor, which should make future optimizations easier to implement.
• Christian Bartolomäus fixed a potential segfault in backtraces on MoarVM.
• Daniel Green optimized some NQP internals.
• Will Coleda brought the NQP documentation more up-to-date.
• Ben Davies fixed some issues with the Capture class, and made Capture.WHICH 60% and Capture.raku 45% faster.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made the sub versions of push / append / shift / prepend about 20x as fast. They also implemented the ^... and ^...^ infix operators, versions of the ... operator that excludes endpoints.
• Vadim Belman fixed a problem with dispatchers and the first candidate of a multi.
• And a number of smaller fixes, optimisations and other improvements.

Questions about Raku

• Alternative to Perl’s <>? by vonbrand.
• How can I propagate and catch errors thrown in another thread? by ryn1x.
• Calculate permutation? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Problems with HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shell by Todd.
• How to reuse a language token in a custom Grammar by Tinmarino.
• How to override the NQPMatch.Str function by Tinmarino.
• What is the most efficient operator to compare any two items? by lisprogtor.
• Are there cases when I have to use elems with an array to make it work? by sid_com.
• Do array indices need to be native ints? by JJ Merelo.
• Script hanging by oxylene.
• Defining classes with several API versions together by JJ Merelo.
• Ten times slower? by Herbert Bollermann.
• What does :b($biggest) mean? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Solving an exponential equation by Lars Malmsteen.
• How to list dynamic and Compile-time variables by Tinmarino.
• Signature can’t be resolved when it’s aliased to a constant by JJ Merelo.
• Making a custom declarator by user0721090601.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Written in Raku by Tao Wang Lab UTSW.
• Shared solutions by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Multi for the first time by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Much to learn by Mohammad S Anwar.
• On sorting in Raku by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Good catch by chenyf.
• Conference in the cloud by The Perl and Raku Conference.
• Calling all presenters! by The Perl and Raku Conference.
• <=> in practice by Andrew Shitov.
• Jonathan sorta blogged by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Interaction with Ethereum nodes by Konstantin Narkhov.
• What these do by Brad Gilbert.
• Too hard for any human by Meng Weng Wong.
• Like to take a look by うぃすきー(箱男).
• How to parse by Salve J. Nilsen.
• Converting to timestamps by Samuel Chase.
• Intervally DateTime by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• The video! by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Rakuers on SBB? by Samuel Chase.
• It’s a backcronym by Mallory van Achterberg.
• A UI to see recent module builds by Alexey Melezhik.
• A week learning the winner by Kurtis McCathern.
• That sweet COBOL money by perhaps with the intensifier.
• Love of Prolog by Simon Proctor.
• Building with Nix and more by The Perl Shop.
• Amazing Colorizable by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Unflattering flat by Konrad Bucheli.
• Regex objects as hash keys by Joseph Brenner.

Comments about Raku

• Comes from english by Brad Gilbert.
• On refinement types by Ralph Mellor.
• Now TIOBE says by Brent Laabs.
• Focus on Raku by Ralph Mellor.
• Just allow both by bmn__.

New Raku Modules

• Date::Calendar::MayaAztec by Jean Forget.
• DBIish::Transaction by Rod Taylor.
• Interval by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Slang::Nogil by Tinmarino.

Updated Raku Modules

• Colorizable by Luis F. Uceta.
• Scalar::Util by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Data::Record by Ben Davies.
• Term::Choose::Util, Term::Choose by Matthäus Kiem.
• Gnome::N, Gnome::Glib, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gdk, Gnome::Gio, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Termbox by José Joaquín Atria.
• Matrix::Client by Matías Linares.
• Text::Utils by Tom Browder.

Winding down

Yet another week of lockdown for most people reading this Rakudo Weekly News about the Raku Programming Language. The coming weeks will not be much different for most, so keep on hanging in there! Stay safe, stay healthy, stay helpful. And we’ll see how things look next week. So see you then!