Alexander Kiryuhin announced the Rakudo 2020.07 Compiler Release just a few days after the targeted date! The delay was caused by some build breakage introduced just days before the release, which needed to be fixed first. The associated binary packages are available at the expected locations.

But that was not the only release they announced this week: there’s also a new (free) Community release of the Comma IDE, the IDE of choice for Raku! Which brings multi-module project support, among many other goodies.

It was Twenty Years Ago Today

On August 1st, it was 20 years ago that the first Perl 6 RFC was published. To celebrate that, JJ Merelo is organizing a special blog series of 20 articles, each covering an RFC and how that RFC ended up being implemented in current day Raku. This is your chance to find out about the history of Raku, and maybe get a better understanding as to why, in Raku, things are the way they are! Either as a blog writer or as a reader!

RakuAST Grant Report

Shortly before going on vacation, Jonathan Worthington has written up a report on their work on the RakuAST grant in July (/r/rakulang comments).

Call for Grant Proposals

Only a few days left to submit your Raku Grant proposals for the July round!

Cleaner code!

Wim Vanderbauwheide has written an extensive article about how programming in a functional style can make your code cleaner: Cleaner code with functional programming. With examples in both Raku and Python, highlighting the similarities and the differences between languages. A must read if you don’t know what functional programming is, or would like to have a refresher.

Introducing Podlite

Alexandr Zahatski has written a nice introductory blog post about Podlite an open-source pod6 markup language editor (/r/rakulang comments). Cool stuff!

Another three!

Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer has written three blogs posts again this week:

• Awaiting a bugfix
• Mimicing quotes
• Handling Failure

Compiling on OpenBSD

Dante Catalfamo has written a blog about their experiences compiling the most recent Rakudo Star on OpenBSD. Although evidently this was not painless, it does have a Hollywood ending (/r/rakulang comments).

For Love of the Underdog

John Longwalker blogs about being able to legitimately say “I did that before it was cool”. How their research into APL and Eiffel, and the use of Raku, has given them the self-realization that blogging about this journey would be a good thing (/r/rakulang comments). Looking forward to future posts!

Raku Pearls

Weekly Challenge

The entries for Challenge #70 that have Raku solutions:

• Weekly Challenge #70 by Luca Ferrari.
• Gray Swapping with Raku & Perl by Arne Sommer.
• Weekly Challenge #70 by Javier Luque.
• Weekly Challenge #70 by Shahed Nooshmand.
• Weekly Challenge #70 (Video Task #1, #2) by Mohammad S Anwar.
• …Exhibiting Gray Areas in Character by Colin Crain.
• Weekly Challenge #70 part #1, #2 by Andrew Shitov.
• Character Swapping and Gray Code Sequence by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Weekly Challenge #70 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.

Andrew Shitov has started reviewing Raku answers to past weeks challenges: check out the videos for week #66 and week #69. And Weekly Challenge #71 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Timo Paulssen added a –dtrace flag to the MoarVM configuration process, allowing one to put DTrace points in different places in the code, and made internal from-json parsing about 4x as fast on the MoarVM backend.
• Patrick Böker fixed an issue that broke the --profile feature.
• Christian Bartolomäus made it easier to get at the operating system name in the configuration of the JVM backend.
• Vadim Belman fixed several small documentation issues and significantly improved the suggestions on the “method not found” error.
• And a few other minor fixes.

Questions about Raku

• Does Raku have tail call optimisation / tail recursion optimisation? by DuchessOfNull.
• How to mock a class method when unit-testing by Julio.
• Having problems with grammars by Camto.
• Can I write an object that behaves like a hash? by Konrad Eisele.
• How to parse a Module name canonically by Richard Hainsworth.
• How to access attributes in object dynamically by Konrad Eisele.
• Is there some model to use to understand containers, references, raw, rw, \ ? by Konrad Eisele.
• How to dump MoarVM bytecode by Konrad Eisele.
• Get the date of the last day of the quarter preceding the quarter in which this date falls by chenyf.
• Understanding &?BLOCK compile-time variable by codesections.
• How to handle nested array with >> and return a flat array? by Konrad Eisele.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Killed things by Mike Gualtieri.
• Experimental features! by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• On the one hand by Simon Proctor.
• Amazing new config module by JJ Merelo.
• 138th in a series by JJ Merelo.
• Alpine Docker images by JJ Merelo.
• Roast defining version by The Perl Shop.
• Best result of rename by mempko.
• Really useful error messages by Simon Proctor.
• Loving the video challenging by Salve J. Nilsen.
• Confused! by Titus Brown.
• Some wrong answers by Daniel Feldman.
• Go for it all! by Thomas Rodgers.
• Sigils! by Dale Weiler.
• Inline it! by Jason Godsey.
• An interpreter by Patrick Schönfeld.
• It’s amazing and it’s released! by mempko.
• A failed experiment by Ryan Ameri.
• Blame game by Joe Groff.
• A lisp by Jeremie Pelletier.
• PG’s response by FENOMEN.
• What happened? by Johnny DC.
• The first RFC by JJ Merelo.
• Faster parsing? by Simon Proctor.
• Programming in bash? by Carde.
• A new report by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Ready in 2100 by Alan Grow.
• Searching a rule on an action by Stéphane Payrard.
• Working on it the last 20 years by Quarantine-age Dirtbag.
• I may be in love by Daniel Lathrop.
• An implementation in… by Marc Espie.
• Inline::Python 3 by Moritz Lenz.
• Superpositions by emmyb, absent-mindedly.
• When without binding by Brad Gilbert.
• Uncomfortably true by Brian Wisti.
• Basic asyncly by JJ Merelo.
• Radical reformation by TANI_Röhei@赭埴庵.
• A parser combinator by mcc.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• I cannot install any lib with zef by Aureliano Guedes.
• Recent book by Warren Pang.
• BUILD and TWEAK by Richard Hainsworth.
• Pod6 examples by Parrot Raiser.
• Baby steps to create a dataframe structure by Aureliano Guedes.
• Learning the ff (flipflop) infix operator? by William Michels.

Comments about Raku

• Electing Raku Steering Council on /r/rakulang.
• Name wrangling by Ralph Mellor.
• Spelled >> by cygx.
• Larry’s inspiration by oilshell.
• Proto classes by Ralph Mellor.
• Named arguments improving code clarity by Moritz Lenz.
• A little bit provocative by Ralph Mellor.
• Looking like a successful transition by mrweasel.
• Raku’s approach by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Gray::Code::RBC by Steve Schulze.
• Intl::UserTimezone by Matthew Stuckwisch.
• PDF::Tags, FDF by David Warring.
• Random::Names by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Raku Modules

• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Hash2Class by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• App::AizuOnlineJudge, Chart::Gnuplot by Itsuki Toyota.
• Template::Mustache by Tim Siegel.
• Math::Libgsl::RandomDistribution by Fernando Santagata.
• Sparky by Alexey Melezhik.
• JSON::Fast by Timo Paulssen.

Winding down

A week with a flurry of releases and quite a few blog posts and some cool new modules, a good trend!

Do you want to have a say in the direction the Raku Programming Language is moving? Then make yourself available as a potential Raku Steering Council member. Want to know more? Check out the proposed Raku Governance Model!

Finally, again, yours truly keeps repeating: don’t forget to stay healthy and to stay safe. See you next week!