Stefan Seifert has even done more than their usual amount of work on Rakudo. But the past week was special in that they developed a GCC-plugin that showed potential issues with objects being moved by Garbage Collection when the code assumed they couldn’t be. And this showed more than 30 of these cases that, in certain situations, could cause (very hard to reproduce) segfaults to happen. And all of these got fixed as well. A nice cleanup indeed!

Binex and Objex

Alabemenhu (aka guifa) has committed their work in progress to allow grammars to interpret binary data. Still hoping for a nice blog post. Great work so far, and already pretty useful!

Conference in the Cloud

Only a few more days for you to submit a Raku presentation for the Perl and Raku Conference in the Cloud (on 24-26 June). And there are really not enough Raku presentations yet!

“Just a chapter”

Andrew Shitov still found time to publish Chapter 9 of their compiler book, about evaluating Abstract Syntax Trees (aka ASTs). And quite a chapter it is!

Renaming Progress

Weekly Challenge

The Raku entries for Challenge #57:

• I suck at doing trees by Luca Ferrari.
• An Inverted Prefix with Raku by Arne Sommer.
• Tree Inversion and Shortest Unique Prefix by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Weekly Challenge #57 by Javier Luque.
• Weekly Challenge #57 by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Weekly Challenge #57 by Shahed Nooshmand.

Laurent Rosenfeld did a full review of all Raku solutions of week #54. And finally, Challenge #58 is up for your perusal!

Other Core Developments

• Claudio Ramirez created Rakudo packages for the new Ubuntu 20.04 release.
• Clifton Wood improved Blin output to make the release work easier. This motivated Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev to awesomify it even more. But improvements to the release tooling didn’t stop there, Whateverable can now run code and bisect on commits of any branch (not just master), meaning that it’s now easier to try features that are not merged yet and also significantly easier to test release branches (example).
• Dave Lewis reduced the amount of memory that the utf8-c8 decoding uses, especially when doing this from multiple threads at the same time.
• Will Coleda continued documenting undocumented nqp opcodes.
• Patrick Böker fixed building Rakudo with the JVM backend on Windows.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made the Real.sign method always return an Int, and made the Int.sign method about 2x as fast. They also added the VM.request-garbage-collection method, to request a garbage collection run (on the MoarVM backend only for now).
• Suman Khanal fixed several issues in the README.md.
• And a small number of fixes, optimisations and other improvements.

Questions about Raku

• Backspace in REPL gives spaces by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Are push and pop operation for hashes and arrays atomic and thread-safe? by lisprogtor.
• Difference between -> $a { } and sub ($a) { } ? by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Something we haven’t stolen from another language – yet? by bobthecimmerian.
• Why do I have to do this? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Primality algorithm? by 十六夜　龍.
• I was trying to find the source code of the raku language. And I failed by bessarabov.
• Parallel/functional methods by Sprinklerkopf.
• Calling same function in threads with different parameters by lisprogtor.
• Save data structure dump in scalar by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Building multiple backends for Raku fails by Suman Khanal.
• Question about macros by reddit_clone.
• How to enable pthread_yield support by Suman Khanal.
• What’s the difference between $/ and $¢ in regex? by user0721090601.
• Struggling with Grammars by s-ro_mojosa.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Reserve your spot today! by The Perl and Raku Conference.
• Relatively minor by Rahul Siddhartan.
• History is circular by Dmitry Lobanov.
• Helpful error messages by Simon Proctor.
• Changed to raku-mode by エヌユル.
• Why Raku? by ʇɥƃıluooɯ ǝıʇɐs 𖥶.
• Very interesting by Ireneusz Cichocki.
• Getting into… by ann hedonia 👻.
• Camelias in the wild by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Look for your problem by برعي.
• Marking as invocant byبرعي.
• Adding in Raku soon by Igor Chubin.
• Just different enough by Joelle Maslak.
• A shout out by Chris (usually).
• Saying hi by DynamicWebPaige @ 127.0.0.1.
• Please add Raku by FreeBSD Frau.
• Had it installed by tilde town.
• Needs an update by brian d foy.
• A mini-language for comments by JJ Merelo.
• It’s cool by A F pangolino amoroso e dudu dadada.
• Installing from remote Github repositories by Alexey Melezhik.
• Good mentors by 𝚃𝚒𝚖 𝙰𝚞𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚗.
• More idiomatic by The Perl Shop.
• Missed it’s now Raku by h100gfld.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• readchars, seek back, and readchars again by Joseph Brenner.
• Using slurp to read in a utf16 file by Joseph Brenner.

Comments about Raku

• Arbitrary post processing by Ralph Mellor.
• May be a contender by CUViper.
• Added the Weekly Challenge by zubenel0.
• Conflict resolution by jdoege.
• Never going to use Raku by igravious.
• Throwing mugs and aiming for the moon by donio.
• No one uses by loeg.
• A debacle so big by reedwolf.
• Happily lifted from Perl by Ralph Mellor.
• Leave macros alone for now by Ralph Mellor.
• Any plans for a Raku HOP book? by zerr

New Raku Modules

• Test::Async by Vadim Belman.
• String::Rotate, Base::Any by Steve Schulze.

Updated Raku Modules

• Term::Choose by Matthäus Kiem.
• BitEnum by Curt Tilmes.
• IO::Path::XDG by Patrick Spek.
• PDF::Class by David Warring.
• Sparrowdo::RemoteFile, Sparrowdo::Cpanm::Github by Alexey Melezhik.
• Math::Libgsl::Matrix by Fernando Santagata.
• Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.

Winding down

A lot of work being done behind the scenes this week. Still, quite a nice catch of new and updated modules. Yours truly keeps repeating: stay safe, stay healthy, stay helpful. See you next week!