It’s that time of the year again! Time for the yearly Raku User Survey! Please fill in the survey so that the Raku Community can better tweak the Raku experience. Kudos to JJ Merelo for organizing this once again!

Metamuxing

Brian Duggan has written a nice introduction into their latest project tmeta, “a console for your console”. It is a wrapper for tmux that supports sending and receiving data to/from tmux panes. And all written in the Raku Programming Language! (Twitter, /r/rakulang comments). Great to see a general purpose tool being written in Raku! And so well explained in a blog post!

Rakudo Compiler 2020.08.1 Release

Alexander Kiryuhin announced the Rakudo 2020.08 Compiler Release on time! Sadly, a bug in the revamped release process that caused version information to not be updated, made a 2020.08.1 release necessary. Nonetheless, as usual, associated binary packages are available at the expected locations.

Podlite update

Alexandr Zahatski‘s Podlite, the open source pod6 editor for Windows, Mac and Linux has gotten an update.

RakuAST progress

Jonathan Worthington reported on their progress on the RakuAST grant: the first BEGIN-time construct (the use statement) is now supported in RakuAST.

Another first impression

Gábor Szabo takes a look at the Raku Programming Language (again). Perhaps it is an idea to add a help function to the REPL 🙂

Video finally

Thanks to the work of the video team of FOSDEM, the video of JJ Merelo‘s presentation at FOSDEM 2020 has been released. Check how they explain on why syntax is not so important, with an introduction to the emerging language Raku!

The last of the RFC investigations

The final batch of cool blog posts in honour of the 20th Anniversary of the Perl 6 RFC process:

• RFC 200, by Nathan Wiger: Revamp tie to support extensibility by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• RFC 84 by Damian Conway: => => => by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• RFC 28, Perl should stay Perl, by Simon Cozens by Will Coleda (Twitter announcement).
• RFC 265: Interface polymorphism considered lovely by Vadim Belman (Twitter announcement).

A nice piece of history review, gathered together in 21 blog posts!

Only the one

Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer wrote only one blog post this week: Exceptionally Colourful.

Extra Produce

A nice batch of blog posts by Andrew Shitov in the Pearls of Raku series: Issue 7: Triangular reduction operator (/r/rakulang comments) and Issue 8: the secrets of min (and max) (/r/rakulang comments) in addition to the blog posts for the Weekly Challenge.

Weekly Challenge

The entries for Challenge 74 that have Raku solutions:

• Weekly Challenge #74 by Luca Ferrari.
• Majority Character with Raku by Arne Sommer.
• Weekly Challenge #74 by Javier Luque.
• Weekly Challenge #74, Video Task #1, Task #2 by Mohammad S Anwar.
• When Majority Rule Plays Finders Keepers by Colin Crain.
• Weekly Challenge #74 by Andrew Shitov (/r/rakulang comments).
• Majority Element and FNR Character by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Weekly Challenge #74 by Jaldhar H. Vyas.
• Weekly Challenge #74 by Shahed Nooshmand.

In related Challenge news: Mohammad S Anwar announced the rename to “Weekly Challenge”, Andrew Shitov reviewed all of the Raku solutions of Challenge #73. The Weekly Challenge #75 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

• Elizabeth Mattijsen made the error shown on an ambiguous dispatch less cluttery.

Since core development is moving towards a more Pull Request oriented approach, this overview will from now on also contain an overview of new Pull Requests.

• A better hash
• Proof of concept bindings for fetch_delete_key and a regression test
• Suggest method names without checking for capitalization
• Precomp store parallelism
• Make JVM honor $PERL6_HOME env variable
• Make Mu.Int work the same as Mu.Numeric
• Introducing the allomorph class
• Remove special handling of ne and != wrt Junctions

Please check them out and leave any comments that you may have!

Questions about Raku

• Can’t overload the >> operator by cowbaymoo.
• Can Raku guarantee that a pattern match is exhaustive (at compile time)? by codesections.
• How can I set the level of precision for sqrt? by Julio.
• What type checks does Raku perform at compile time? May that change in the future? by codesections.
• What is confusing Raku here? by zeekar.
• Best Practices Book? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• How do I intercept the unbuffered output of a Proc::Async? by jja (Twitter comments).
• Use-case of needing to provide an ssl certificate for module management by singe.
• Binding operator used in multi-variable initialization is working only when variables are also declared in the same line by jakar.
• Organisation of a Cro project with DB::Pg by arkad-of-babylon.
• Can Raku’s introspection list all the multi candidates across different files/Modules? by codesections.
• Cloned object not sunk by cowbaymoo.
• How do use a sort on a hash in a for by Richard Hainsworth.
• Accessing the values in an array of lists of pairs by Lars Malmsteen.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Made me laugh by Norman M. Birkett.
• Moving towards target by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Results in a Tweet by Herbert Bollermann.
• Tell us in the devroom by JJ Merelo.
• Chaos caused by Ewen McNeill.
• Is she the one? by Koji.
• Makes me sad by Aram.
• Rather Old Yoshiyuki.
• Most Unwanted? by Ankit Aggarwal.
• The Wait is killing me! by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Finally out! bu Salve J. Nilsen.
• Like to hire by Michal Jurosz.
• Belongs to Japanese pottery by Herbert Bollermann.
• Looking Forward by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• What is this? by panponpenpe.
• Not in Raku by EricLondo::tweet( 💻🐧👣🦀 ).
• Already did that by Mark Higbee.
• Falling in love by Daniel Lathrop.
• Feeling conflicted by Volpe Volante.
• Ask for a slot in the next Advent by JJ Merelo.
• Not like Perl 6 or something by Longplay Games.
• A Wanderer by Laurent Cimon.
• My favourite by EricLondo::tweet( 💻🐧👣🦀 ).
• Even in Raku by Cees Timmerman.
• Best of 3 weeks by Mohammad S Anwar.
• First steps in transitioning by ⌨️ to the point and forth.
• Not quite efficient by Herbert Bollermann.
• Abusing Win32 calls by Ramiro Encinas.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• Multi-file ‘join’ question on Twitter… by William Michels.
• Readline package by dwl.

Comments about Raku

• Enthusiastically by dragonwriter.
• Nicer by svachalek.
• Unifying exceptions by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Games::Maze by Mohammad S Anwar (/r/rakulang comments).
• System::Stats::MEMUsage by Ramiro Encinas.
• FixedInt by Steve Schulze.
• LibGit2 by Curt Tilmes.

Updated Raku Modules

• LibXML, HTML::Canvas, HTML::Canvas::To::PDF by David Warring.
• Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• LibUSB by Travis Gibson.
• Trait::Traced by Ben Davies.
• Shell::DSL by Jack Kuan (/r/rakulang comments).

Winding down

Only two weeks to go to make yourself available as a candidate for the coming Raku Steering Council elections!

codesections pointed out that sometimes bugs can live for a long time in a story about a 35-year old bug in patch by Larry Wall. Yours truly thinks this bodes well for the future of Raku 🙂

Yet again a week with emphasis on blog posting and modules in the ecosystem! But also a week with a compiler release! Yours truly keeps repeating: don’t forget to stay healthy and to stay safe. See you next week, in good health!