Jonathan Worthington tweeted that they finally found the time and the voice to record the presentation they had planned for the German Perl and Raku Workshop. You can either watch the video and/or look through the slides. It basically touches on these four subjects:

• Where is Rakudo now with regards to macros
• Why it’s time to overhaul the Rakudo compiler frontend
• The design of RakuAST, an AST for mere mortals
• A tentative time-path with milestones

Yours truly is particularly excited about the concept of RakuAST, which should allow building executable code without having to resort to using EVAL, with all of its security and performance implications. Exciting times!

Reintroducing ArrayHash

Sterling Hanenkamp redesigned / refactored their ArrayHash module, which originally predated the Great List Refactor, and wrote a very interesting blog post about it.

So you have an idea for a project…

Then this round of Perl Foundation Grant Proposals is the place to be! Make sure that you write your proposal before the April 18th UTC. And if you’re without inspiration, then maybe one of the grant ideas that have been suggested, is the one for you!

The continuing story of …

Andrew Shitov continued to work on the Covid-19 Observer. The “What’s new” page of the past week shows CSV and XLS download options, per capita data, compare countries, among many other new features. And in the meantime Andrew still found time to publish part 1 of Chapter 8 of their compiler book.

RakuDist Web UI

Alexey Melezhik has written a small blog post with an update about their RakuDist project. Exciting stuff for module developers and core developers alike who need to be informed about module failures!

Comprehensive Raku Archive Index

Chloé Kekoa continued working on the CRAI project, allowing reproducible builds of all modules in the Raku ecosystem. Look for example at modules that mimic Perl behaviour.

Remembering Jeff Goff

Dave Rolsky has posted an obituary for Jeff Goff on behalf of The Perl Foundation (/r/perl comments).

David Adler, who was on the same cruise as Jeff, also wrote down his memories of Jeff.

Renaming Progress

Weekly Challenge

The Raku entries for Challenge #55:

• Weaving and Flipping by Luca Ferrari.
• Weekly Challenge in Raku – Week 55 by Simon Proctor.
• Flipping the Raku Wave by Arne Sommer.
• Binary Numbers and Wave Arrays by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Weekly Challenge #55 by Javier Luque.
• Weekly Challenge #55 by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Weekly Challenge #55 by Shahed Nooshmand.
• Weekly Challenge #55 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.

Challenge #56 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Ben Davies fixed an issue with the order in which header files were being included in MoarVM.
• Will Coleda continued documenting many NQP opcodes that were not or insufficiently documented.
• Stefan Seifert changed the way SQLite imports data from profiles, making sure it can actually handle large profile data sets.
• Patrick Böker fixed building of Rakudo on Windows for non-MoarVM backends.
• Timo Paulssen made the static optimizer find more optimizable opportunities again, which appeared to have been broken since the release of 6.d.
• Christian Bartolomäus found the solution to a long-standing problem with next and labeled loops.
• Tim Smith added support for the INPUTRC environment variable, which points to the Readline config that should be used in the REPL.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made the conversion of Nums to Rats about 25% faster, which affects the use of now similarly.
• And a number of smaller fixes, optimisations and other improvements.

Questions about Raku

• int32 failure by hsmyers.
• How to destructure for loop parameters into array of fixed size? by lisprogtor.
• Why does Duration.new work with Int but not Rat? by p6steve.
• Alternation in regexes seems to be terribly slow in big files by JJ Merelo.
• Signature restriction in roles by margolari.
• Can I replace a character with substr? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Looks like it is readonly? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• What is the best way to learn scientific computing by Tao Wang.
• How to sort hash by values by Mohammad S Anwar.
• What’s the most difficult thing in Raku for a Perl developer? by Andrew Shitov.
• How to remove a multi method by Tinmarino.
• Use Haskell like Prelude modules in a module by margolari.
• Does Apache use the pre-compiled script? by oxylene.
• MixHash working usefully – but need some clarifications by p6steve.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• They just decided by Travis Cole.
• Wait till… by Michael Scovetta.
• Looks Prology by Simon Proctor.
• Interesting by Raza 👨🏻‍💻 Sayed.
• Attend from the comfort of your home by The Perl and Raku Conference.
• Give it new life by Alexey Melezhik.
• Even dumber classes by Craig Pearlman.
• And a Raku one by JJ Merelo.
• In a nutshell by Paul Bütow.
• Keep only https? URLs by برعي.
• Automatic prefetching to-one by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Treating separately? by しーある.
• Can you believe it? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Almost any modern scripting language by JJ Merelo.
• The disaster by Lubos Kolouch.
• Split in two by Andrew Shitov.
• When on the JVM? by Herbert Bollermann.
• Commemorating John Conway by Kang-min Liu.
• Both Array and Hash by The Perl Shop.
• Vs vs vs vs by Juan_Carlos.

Comments about Raku

• Periodic Table of Operators by mr_clicky_keys.
• Worth checking out by daotoad.
• Grappling with the same issue by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Date::Calendar::Gregorian by Jean Forget.
• Gcrypt by Curt Tilmes.

Updated Raku Modules

• Gnome::N, Gnome::Glib, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gdk, Gnome::Gio, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• ArrayHash by Sterling Hanenkamp.
• Net::IP, Excel::Text::Template by Tom Browder.
• Data::Record by Ben Davies.
• Tomty by Alexey Melezhik.
• Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Geo::Hash by Itsuki Toyota.
• Template::Classic by Chloé Kekoa.
• PDF::Class by David Warring.
• List::MoreUtils by Elizabeth Mattijsen

Winding down

Wow! 13 different authors uploaded a module in the Raku Programming Language in the past week. Pretty sure that’s a record! Looks like the lockdown for many is also inspirational to quite a few! For the rest, yours truly repeats: stay safe, stay healthy, stay helpful. See you again next week!