Patrick Böker has added AzureCI as a new Continuous Integration pipeline for Rakudo. It is meant to replace the different CI pipelines that Rakudo uses now. AzureCI tests all build combinations the other CI pipelines tested (plus some more). This will get rid of a good bit of redundant, wasteful testing and will make it easier to provide nightly builds and binary releases (with MacOS, Linux and Windows covered). The plan is to stop using Travis, AppVeyor and CircleCI for testing Rakudo core soon.

Conference in the Cloud Schedule

The schedule for the Conference in the Cloud has been published (/r/rakulang comments). The following presentations have Raku content:

• Doccing Raku by JJ Merelo.
• The Physics::Unit edge by Stephen Roe.
• Hypers and Gathers and Loops… Oh, my! by Steven Lembark.
• A Simple Matter of Programming by Damian Conway.
• Threaded Text Console UI in Raku by Vadim Belman.
• Creating a Distributable GUI Application in Raku by Morayj.
• Creating Secure Decentralized Content Management Systems on Ethereum Blockchain with Raku by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Going International in Raku by Matthew Stephan Stuckwisch.
• Improving the Perception of Perl and Raku by Stuart J Mackintosh.
• RakuAST: a Foundation for Raku Macros by Jonathan Worthington.

If you want to attend the presentations interactively, you can get a ticket for just 10 US$ (or how much more you would like to donate). Presentations will also be available on YouTube.

Rakudo Star 2020.05.1

Naoum Hankache informs us that there is now a Release Candidate for Rakudo Star 2020.05.1 on Windows, while Patrick Spek informs us there is another 2020.05.1 release candidate for other operating systems as well. Kudos to both for making this happen!

Reading DNA and Count Bases

Suman Khanal has written a nice blog post about using Raku in Bioinformatics (HackerNews comments), specifically related to parsing FASTA files. It also had a challenge, which Elizabeth Mattijsen took on and resulted in the initial version of a Fasta module.

Logs, autorotating

Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer has written a blog post about automatically rotating logs (/r/rakulang comments)

April Report

Jonathan Worthington reported on the work they did on the Raku Development Grant in April.

Weekly Challenge

These are entries for Challenge #60 that have Raku solutions:

• Weekly Challenge #60 by Luca Ferrari.
• Excellent Find with Raku by Arne Sommer.
• Excel Columns and Find Numbers by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Weekly Challenge #60 by Javier Luque.
• Weekly Challenge #60 by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Weekly Challenge #60 by Shahed Nooshmand.
• An Excellent Gathering by Colin Crain.
• Excel columns and number generation by Roger Bell West.

Challenge #61 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Vittore F. Scolari fixed a problem with CStruct inlining.
• Tom Browder improved the error messages for erroneous <.panic()> syntax and sprintf having more directives than values.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made numerification of integer values as a string about 2.5x faster and fixed several .WHICH method implementations. They also added an IO::Handle.do-not-close-automatically method to make sure that Rakudo will not try to close that handle ever (usually because an external library such as LibXML will close it). And made IO::Path.slurp upto 4.7x as fast.
• Vadim Belman fixed an issue with building Rakudo if only an nqp file had been changed.
• Donald Hunter made the .gist of multidimensional arrays more palatable.
• Tim Siegel fixed a problem with .comb(Str) producing overlapping results.
• Stefan Seifert fixed an issue with BEGIN time EVAL running the CHECK phasers of the outer compilation unit.
• Christian Bartolomäus worked on fixing several issues on the JVM backend.
• And quite a number of other fixes, optimisations, and improvements.

Questions about Raku

• How can I insert some route-checking middleware in Cro? by JJ Merelo.
• How to benchmark? by Suman Khanal.
• In CommaIDE, what is the difference between running a cro service as a regular script and running it as a cro service? by JJ Merelo.
• Named command line parameter as a array of Int? by Mohammad S Anwar
• What is the meaning of (Any) – specifically the ()? by Ross Attrill.
• Are they the same? by Mohammad S Anwar.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Shorter by Ralph Mellor.
• Multi-dimensional syntax by Khalid Elboray.
• Honouring Douglas Adams by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Reading MAIN implementation code by Khalid Elboray.
• Will it be amazing? by 峯島雄治　Minejima Yuji.
• Make == chainable? by Kang-min Liu.
• Renamed by ともぽぽぽ.
• Count Bases by Suman Khanal.
• Unused by medy.
• Changed its name? by Junichi ‘DJ’ Nakano.
• Every cool language at the same time by JJ Merelo.
• Reached 1400 by JJ Merelo.
• Extensive CSV support by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Oh Dear by Not Actual Game Footage.
• How to implement “thing” by O Berna.
• Zap is ready! by Khalid Elboray.
• On combinations and crossing by Mohammad S Anwar.
• RakuDa by David Acevedo 🇵🇷.
• I won’t do it! by Sandro.
• Not going on vacation by Hermen Lesscher, M.V.A.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• slurp with enc(“utf16”) doesn’t work by Joseph Brenner.
• The state of the build and install instructions by Joseph Brenner.
• Matching subpatterns in any order, conjunctions, negated matches by Joseph Brenner.
• Different return values with say vs put (Nil representation… ) by William Michels.

Comments about Raku

• A thorn in the eye by Reini Urban.
• Is Raku worth learning? by electricant.
• Less friction by cygx.
• Raku for fun by Patrick Spek.
• Int(1000*6.565) by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Slower than Ruby by jerf.
• Know of Raku history? by Ralph Mellor.
• Syntactic sugar by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Zap by Khalid Elboray.
• Cro::HTTP::Session::Pg by Jonathan Worthington.
• Fasta by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Grammar::DiceRolls, IRC::Client::Plugin::DiceRolls, Log, Log::Simple, Log::Colored, Log::JSON by Patrick Spek.

Updated Raku Modules

• Date::Calendar::FrenchRevolutionary by Jean Forget.
• Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.
• Sparrow6, Sparrowdo by Alexey Melezhik.
• Test::Async by Vadim Belman.
• IRC::Client::Plugin::NickServ by Patrick Spek.
• Gnome::N, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• License::SPDX by Jonathan Stowe.
• CucumisSextus, Shelve6 by Robert Lemmen.

Winding down

A week with a lot of work on the internals (the Great Dispatcher Overhaul is coming along nicely), quite a few exciting new modules and module updates and some fine blog posts. Yours truly keeps repeating: stay safe, stay healthy, stay helpful. See you next week!