Less than a week to go until the candidacy period for the first election of the Raku Steering Council ends (at midnight UTC on 6 September 2020, to be precise). So far, ten people have announced their candidacy, which is great to see! Yours truly feels that, to make the Raku Steering Council truly reflect the Raku userbase, there should be more women, more younger people and more people who do not have English as their first language. If you feel you belong to these groups, and you want to be a part of the future of Raku, please consider adding your candidacy! If you have any questions about the process, please feel free to open an issue!

Testing and conditional compilation

Daniel Sockwell explains how they have fallen in love with the Raku Programming Language in an extensive blog post about testing and conditional compilation. It’s really all about applying Rust’s approach to organizing unit tests to Raku. And how the DOC phaser can be appropriated to achieve that goal. An inspiring piece of work that will surely have its influence on the development of Raku (/r/rakulang, /r/rust comments).

Comma Complete Again

Alexander Kiryuhin informs us that there is a new release of Comma Complete, the full featured IDE for Raku. Please note that by buying a copy of Comma Complete, you will also be helping the development of the Comma Community edition, and will help with implementing of the Roadmap.

Ecosystem grant not approved

Sadly, the Raku ecosystem grant proposal did not make it in the July 2020 round of The Perl Foundation grants. Suggestions for an improved grant proposal were made (/r/rakulang comments).

Raku-Utils

Alexey Melezhik has launched a proposal to wrap existing command-line tools into Raku functions.

Weekly Suspects

Gábor Szabo takes another, deeper look at the Raku REPL. Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer wrote about tripping over variables. And another nice blog post by Andrew Shitov in the Pearls of Raku series: Issue 9: toss a coin, topic vs temporary variables (/r/rakulang comments).

Weekly Challenge

The entries for Challenge 75 that have Raku solutions:

• Weekly Challenge #75 by Luca Ferrari.
• Coins & Rectangles with Raku by Arne Sommer.
• Weekly Challenge #75 by Javier Luque.
• Weekly Challenge #75, Video Task #1, Task #2 by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Throw the Windows Wide Open – Change Is In the Air by Colin Crain.
• Weekly Challenge #75, Task #1, Task #2 and a more idiomatic solution by Andrew Shitov.
• Coin Sums and Largest Rectangle Histogram by Laurent Rosenfeld.
• Weekly Challenge #75 by Shahed Nooshmand.

Andrew Shitov reviewed all of the Raku solutions of Challenge #74 with a video version for Task #1 and Task #2. The Weekly Challenge #76 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

This week saw the merging of the new hash implementation work by Nicholas Clark, which could make your program more than 10% faster! In other core developments:

• Patrick Böker fixed raku -V, a problem that was discovered shortly after the 2020.08.1 compiler release, causing a 2020.08.2 release.
• Timo Paulssen made the moar --dump functionality ignore dependency information added by Rakudo, thus making it work on Rakudo bytecode out of the box. They also worked on various aspects of memory allocation in MoarVM.
• Daniel Sockwell fixed the signature on SetHash.set / SetHash.unset methods.

This week’s new Pull Requests:

• Fix MVM_file_isexecutable() when being root
• Proof of concept bindings for fetch_delete_key and a regression test.
• Fix relocatable build-time NQP-home
• The first draft of new coercion semantics
• Sake to ake
• Remove MONKEY-SEE-NO-EVAL export from Test
• Remove the Cool.EVAL method

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

Questions about Raku

• Comma Community release 2020.07.0 sun/javafx/PlatformUtil problem by Anton Antonov.
• Why does non-executed compile-time code increase bytecode size? Does it slow runtime performance? by codesections.
• zef test . returning a different result than running some tests with raku -Ilib by JJ Merelo.
• How to enable arithmetic on my custom class? by zeekar.
• Is it possible to define custom metaoperators? by user0721090601.
• Idiomatic way to implement standard Unix behaviour of using STDIN if no files are specified on the command line? by VZ.
• q{} removing spaces in a map by Mimosinnet.
• I’m having trouble running scripts by svagen.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• #75 in a tweet by Herbert Bollermann.
• Have you tried… by Olivier Mengué.
• An accurate answer by Squiggly.
• Alpine container update by JJ Merelo.
• Nice work by Mohammad S Anwar.
• A great fit by The Perl Shop.
• We want to hear from you! by JJ Merelo.
• On the other hand… by Congreso esLibre.
• Under the hood by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Made it look like a good idea by R Myers.
• YAPR by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• A love affair by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Note to not just myself by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Having high hopes by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Haven’t looked back by Kane Valentine.
• Why no stable given / when? by Unsigned 128-bit Coffee.
• Not so easy by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Tell us! by JJ Merelo.
• Translating a $work script by Solomon Foster.
• No transcendentals by William Ricker.
• Would have been fine by Gergely Brautigam.
• Fourth time 100+ by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Don’t need no algorithm by Andrew Shitov.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

• print particular lines question by ToddAndMargo.
• Raku User’s Survey 2020 out now…. by William Michels.
• Extended identifiers in named attributes by Marcel Timmerman.
• Seq whitespace sensitivity? by William Michels.
• Associative class for any key, any value by yary.
• lines :$nl-in question by ToddAndMargo.
• lines and :chomp question by ToddAndMargo.
• Reminder: Fill Raku’s user survey! by JJ Merelo.
• How to I modify what is a new line in lines? by ToddAndMargo.
• pod6 and markdown by Fernando Santagata.
• Any other way to do this by Radhakrishnan Venkataraman.

Comments about Raku

• A cool presentation by p6steve.
• It’s Raku by sobrique.

New Raku Modules

• Win32::DrivesAndTypes by Ramiro Encinas.
• Metropolis by Paweł Pabian.
• Test::Inline by Matthew Stuckwisch.
• Math::Libgsl::MovingWindow by Fernando Santagata.

Updated Raku Modules

• Native::Packing by David Warring.
• Gnome::Gtk3, XML::Actions, Pod::Render by Marcel Timmerman.
• Proc::Async::Timeout, Pod::To::BigPage by Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer.
• Fcntl by Michael Stemle.
• Math::Libgsl::Matrix, Math::Libgsl::Constants by Fernando Santagata.
• App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji.
• Raku::Pod::Render by Richard Hainsworth.

Winding down

A week with exciting developments, a love story, and a new Comma Complete release! And thanks to Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer, a complete list of updated Raku modules!

Yours truly keeps repeating: don’t forget to stay healthy and to stay safe. Please check again next week for more news about the Raku Programming Language!