JJ Merelo kicked off the special 20-day Advent Blog cycle in honour of the publication of the first RFC that would lay the foundation for the Raku Programming Language as we now know it. After that, 3 blog posts got already published:

• RFC1: Threads (Bryan C. Warnock) by JJ Merelo.
• RFC112: Assignment within a regex (Richard Proctor) by Moritz Lenz.
• RFC25/76/193: Worthy Picks (Damian Conway) by Alexander Kiryuhin.

Looking forward to another 17 to come! If you’re interested in writing one, there are still some open slots available!

Ecosystem Grant Proposal

Tony O’Dell has submitted a grant proposal to redesign the Raku / zef ecosystem and to make it easier to submit your distribution to the ecosystem. Please leave any thoughts you have for this very interesting proposal, so that the Grants Committee can make a better founded decision (/r/rakulang comments).

Raku Steering Council Election

Thanks to feedback from the community, the nomination for candidates and the actual election, have been moved back a month, to 6 September 2020 (nomination) and 20 September 2020 (election). This should give people more time to consider nominating themselves and to allow the word of the election to spread further. Vadim Belman blogged about it. See the (adapted) announcement.

Making Github Actions easier

Shoichi Kaji blogged about the new setup-raku for Github Actions distribution. A cool way of setting up your own Continuous Integration testing of your Raku modules on Github!

Another Five!

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

• Augmenting with Exitcode
• Dogfood time!
• Concurrent dogfood
• Wrapping Exceptions
• Drop-in Replacement

Weekly Challenge

The entries for Challenge #71 that have Raku solutions:

• Weekly Challenge #71 by Luca Ferrari.
• Peaked Trim with Raku & Perl by Arne Sommer.
• Weekly Challenge #71 by Javier Luque.
• Weekly Challenge #71 by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Traversing Peaks for the Missing Link by Colin Crain.
• Weekly Challenge #71 by Andrew Shitov.
• Peak Elements and Trim Linked List by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Weekly Challenge #71 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.
• Weekly Challenge #71, part 1 by Simon Proctor.

Andrew Shitov reviewed Weekly Challenge #67, Raku answers for #70 challenge #1 and a video one for challenge #2 of week 70, and did another issue of “Pearls of Raku”: unit sub MAIN and command line, round and precision (/r/rakulang comments)

Weekly Challenge #72 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Timo Paulssen continued their work on the MoarVM debugserver.
• Daniel Green fixed some new compiler warnings on MoarVM.
• Christian Bartolomäus implemented the execname op on the JVM backend.
• Vadim Belman implemented type checking of Raku roles in NQP and fixed an issue with exception throwing and KnowHOW classes.
• Ben Davies removed some now unnecessary workaround from the Cool class and fixed an issue with exception (re-)throwing on some Supply methods.
• And some other minor fixes.

Questions about Raku

• How to pass a pointer to a Buf to a native call for writing by cowbaymoo.
• Partial Match in a Grammar by sugarfi.
• Support Whatever ranges in multidimensional subscript access with AT-POS by randy.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Foundering by Tymac.
• Swap Rules! by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Array Pickin’ by Simon Proctor.
• Would take over by EricLondo::tweet(🐧🐧🐧).
• Released! by Markov HN Titles.
• Hex float literals by Computer Science.
• Amazing by hardmaru.
• Deploying Kubernetes by Alexey Melezhik.
• What to do with * + * by ryota-ka bot.
• An easier way by Kat Maddox.
• Moving Back by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• As good as Raku by El Almacén 𓆏.
• Where is it? by xv6ks.
• Yearning by Brian Wisti.
• Raku Recipes out soon! by JJ Merelo.
• Not catching on by 𝙼𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚘𝚠 0x1338 𝙴𝚕𝚕𝚒𝚜.
• It’s coming! by Steven Rosenberg.
• Counting Days by chromatic.
• Syntax for state machines by Rampaging Corn Demon 🌽 🌌🧠.
• An issue with Alpine by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• df.column1 … stealing from others could be counter-productive? by Marc Chantreux.
• Any sign of a fix for the 10 second compile time? by ToddAndMargo.
• SF Perl’s Raku Study Group by Joseph Brenner.
• DBIish tries to hijack NativeLibs? by Fernando Santagata.
• zef: too many files in ~/.raku/short by Fernando Santagata.
• Missing set operator by yary.
• Learning the ff operator by yary.

Comments about Raku

• Cleaving every non-native datatype by Ralph Mellor.
• Also wrote by Brent Laabs.
• Having EVAL on the RHS by Reini Urban.
• Sure looks impressive by z5432x.
• Using dynasm by Reini Urban.
• Getting started by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Shell::Piping by Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer.
• Math::Libgsl::Statistics, Math::Libgsl::RunningStatistics by Fernando Santagata.
• Discogs::API by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Raku Modules

• KHPH by Mark Devine.
• App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji.
• Net::BGP by Joelle Maslak.
• Date::Calendar::MayaAztec by Jean Forget.
• Hash2Class by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Math::Libgsl::Constants by Fernando Santagata.
• Sparrowdo by Alexey Melezhik.

Winding down

Again quite a few blog posts and some cool new modules! Yours truly keeps repeating: don’t forget to stay healthy and to stay safe. See you next week!