Arne Sommer has started publishing a number of blog posts on how to create a Raku shell (a command line interpreter like Bash). The first instalments cover paths, loops, catching interrupts and running external programs. In interesting introduction to many Raku features. And maybe the start of something really cool! (/r/rakulang comments).

Conference in the Cloud

As we know, all Perl Conferences are basically cancelled until further notice, but the organizers have not stopped: on 24-26 June there will be a Perl and Raku Conference in the Cloud. And there are really not enough Raku presentations yet! So, set aside your fears, and submit a Raku presentation! You have until May to register your presentation, so you still have a little time to mull over a subject.

Pod6 in Javascript

Alexandr Zahatski surprised yours truly, and probably many others, with an implementation of Rakudoc (aka pod6) in Javascript, and a blog post with a status update. You can even try it out in your browser! Cool stuff (/r/rakulang comments).

Grammars for binary data

Alabemenhu (aka guifa) has been working on making it possible to use grammars to interpret binary data (as opposed to strings). Yours truly is hoping for a very nice blog post about it soon. In the meantime, you can leave any comments / suggestions that you have.

Saving 70%

P6steve hit rock bottom and decided to use their Raku programming chops developed in the past years to re-invent the Physics::Unit module, and blog about it (HackerNews comments).

Grant Proposal

Last week, Jonathan Worthington surprised us with the introduction of their RakuAST plans. This week, they have submitted a RakuAST grant proposal for a TPF grant. Your comments on the proposal will be very much appreciated.

One month later

Andrew Shitov looked back on the first month of the Covid-19 Observer, which is now also available in Russian. And in the meantime Andrew still found time to publish part 2 of Chapter 8 of their compiler book.

Renaming Progress

Weekly Challenge

The Raku entries for Challenge #56:

• Trees and Distance by Luca Ferrari.
• Diff Sum by Raku by Arne Sommer.
• Diff-k and Path Sum by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Weekly Challenge #56 by Javier Luque.
• Weekly Challenge #56 by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Weekly Challenge #56 by Shahed Nooshmand.
• Diff-K and Path Sum by Ryan J Thompson.

Laurent Rosenfeld revisited the Collatz Sequence of 2 weeks ago, calculating the sequence length for all numbers up to 1_000_000 (/r/rakulang, HackerNews comments). You can also meet Alicia Bielsa, the March Champion of the Weekly Challenge. And finally, Challenge #57 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert fixed some issues with taking heap snapshots and several issues with scheduling of work in affinity threads in the ThreadPoolScheduler.
• Daniel Green reduced the memory requirements for native int to str conversion, and made it possible for encoding to take a pre-allocated buffer.
• Jonathan Worthington fixed a long standing issue in reporting execution errors happening within in NativeCall callbacks.
• Jan-Olof Hendig also fixed an issue with heap snapshots.
• Ben Davies fixed some Clang compiler warnings. And added a proper Supply.iterator method.
• Wictor Lund fixed some C alignment issues in MoarVM.
• Will Coleda continued documenting undocumented nqp:: ops.
• Martin Ryan added a better indentation routine for dumping AST nodes in NQP.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made Num.Rat conversion 1.5x as fast. They also added Date.first-date-in-month and Date.last-date-in-month methods.
• Patrick Böker fixed the --nqp-home configuration parameter.
• Christian Bartolomäus made it possible to use named labels on various loop constructs that weren’t supported before.
• And a number of smaller fixes, optimisations and other improvements.

Questions about Raku

• Get the item with the biggest value in a Bag by Lars Malmsteen.
• Being productive in large Raku projects? by mr_clicky_keys.
• Script with a variable number of Real arguments by vonbrand.
• Accepting an Array of Int by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Using fmt() by Mohammad S Anwar.
• What can Raku do? by Haitamdragon.
• How to arrayref? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Lists and Arrays assumption by Mohammad S Anwar.
• How to call a method within a signal block? by sid_com.
• Just Ints by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Raku considered harmful? by daniellionel.
• It prints 6 by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Destructure a List of Pairs by Holli.
• Capture output to a scalar? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Comma IDE has no intellisense for objects of built-in types? by cowbaymoo.
• unit sub MAIN? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Expecting flattened by Mohammad S Anwar.
• How is the xx operator able to delay the evaluation of its left-hand side code operand? by cowbaymoo.
• There doesn’t seem to be armhf build of Rakudo by solpaadjustmadisar.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Run COBOL as a dialect by Raul Miller.
• Underscore is good by TANI_Röhei@赭埴葊.
• Dabbled a bit? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• I’m fine by アクメディア·プランニング.
• Final CFP for TPRCiC by The Perl and Raku Conference.
• Rebranded? by Juan.
• In the wild by Meghan.
• Sufficiently powerful metaprogramming features by Soham Chowdhury.
• Book recommendations by Christopher E. Stith.
• Implemented in Haskell soon by Syoyo Fujita 🌸 レイトラ 🐯 2 周年 🎉.
• By Christmas by Pete Keen.
• -7/3 is? by Curtis “Ovid” Poe.
• Powerful Programming Languages by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• The good old ballpoint/stylus pen by taguchi.
• Supremacy Project by MysteryHacker.
• How about performance? by Michał Majchrzak.
• Clears most of my doubts by Mohammad S Anwar.
• The chaos I’m living for by tyler.
• What to call goof Raku code by adriene @ ACNH.
• Utterly batshit insane by tyler.
• Conway’s comments by ktamura.
• More powerful abstractions by SourceContribute.
• Added some code to RosettaCode by Herbert Bollermann.
• Exciting grant proposal! by Raku Programming Language Newsfeed.
• Will suffice by Amit Kumar Yadav.
• Embedding code in a subst by Andrew Shitov.
• Will this work? by JJ Merelo.
• Wallclock time analysis by JJ Merelo.
• List files matching a pattern by Suman Khanal🇳🇵.
• This isn’t golfed by Herbert Bollermann.
• Relatively minor by Rahul Siddhartan.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• subst :g and captures in the replacement by yary.

Comments about Raku

• You made me want to learn Raku by Jeacom512.
• No x flag by Ralph Mellor.
• Sociopathic behaviour by WesternStar.

New Raku Modules

• SuperMAIN by Claudio Ramirez.

Updated Raku Modules

• Gcrypt, BitEnum by Curt Tilmes.
• Gnome::N, Gnome::Glib, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gdk, Gnome::Gio, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.
• ProcStats by Steven Lembark.
• Algorithm::NaiveBayes by Itsuki Toyota.

Winding down

Quite a few blog posts, and exciting developments this week, so who’s to complain? Finally, yours truly repeats again: stay safe, stay healthy, stay helpful. See you next week!