Votemaster Will Coleda has published the results of the first Raku Steering Council election. Thanks to everybody who has voted! The elected council members are (in alphabetical order of their last name):

• Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev (@AlexDaniel)
• Nick Logan (@ugexe)
• Elizabeth Mattijsen (@lizmat)
• Juan-Julián Merelo-Guervós (@JJ)
• Stefan Seifert (@niner)
• Daniel Sockwell (@codesections)
• Jonathan Worthington (@jnthn)

Congratulations! Yours truly assumes that after an initial meeting, the Council will come with a statement on how to proceed with the future of the Raku Programming Language.

Another Raku Survey

JJ Merelo has announced the results of the more general Raku User Survey that has been running in the past weeks: the raw CSV, and preliminary PDF. Kudos to JJ Merelo for taking care of this yet another year!

The DB of Unicode

Daniel Sockwell dives into the Unicode internals of the Raku Programming Language and finds out in more detail that Raku is pretty unique in that respect. In A deep dive into Raku’s Unicode support (/r/rakulang comments).

Of Proxy and Containers

Vadim Belman elaborates on the Proxy Container in the Advanced Raku for Beginners series: in other words, how you can override the FETCH and STORE methods on containers.

Many Pearls

Andrew Shitov wrote three episodes in the Pearls of Raku series this week:

• Issue 10: The -rw things
• Issue 11: Wrapping things (/r/rakulang comments)
• Issue 12: All and any (/r/rakulang, Twitter comments)

Weekly Challenge

Weekly Challenge #79 is available for your perusal. A full review of the Raku solutions of Challenge #77 (including a video run-through) was done by Andrew Shitov.

Core Developments

Most of the core developments have been happening in the rakuast branch. The 2020.09 Rakudo Compiler Release has been postponed to iron out some configuration issues. Meanwhile, in the main branch:

• Nicholas Clark added comments and ASCII diagrams explaining the new way hashes are implemented in MoarVM, which uncovered a very nice piece of hidden internals information to yours truly.
• Stefan Seifert fixed an issue with dumping the contents of a P6opaque object in MoarVM.
• Patrick Böker fixed another set of build issues.
• Vadim Belman started a CAVEATS file for all platform dependent notes. And Will Coleda expanded on that.
• Timo Paulssen has provided an AppImage for the Rakudo Compiler 2020.08.2 release. And possibly even more exciting for Linux users: an AppImage for moarperf, the full MoarVM performance profiler.
• Jonathan Worthington improved the specialization of boxed Nums.

This week’s new Pull Requests:

• copy_to should call MVM_gc_write_barrier with the *new* key’s address
• Hash allocation as a single memory block
• Update digest-sha on any source change
• De-huffmanize Capture.raku
• Precalculate prime numbers in first 100K
• Fix stub packages in multi part declarations only knowing part of the…
• Build: Perl6::SysConfig depends on NQPs HLL::SysConfig
• Remove unnecessary branch in .truncate

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

Questions about Raku

Finally crossed the 1500 question mark on StackOverflow. Keep those questions coming! Meanwhile:

• How are enums augmentable? by Ben Davies.
• Benchmark comparisons by 2020-2050_SHTF.
• Can the raku built in accessor methods be overridden by a child class? by p6steve.
• Booklets O’Mazed made with Raku by cogniferous.
• Why can’t I name a sigilless variable v+digit? by jakar.
• What does the has keyword mean before method in a class definition? by jja.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• When Lisp is too static by Ken Hates Software.
• Fun recursing by Markus Holzer.
• Really need to look at regex syntax by Alvar C.H. Freude.
• Still working on it? by Brenda Wallace, Potato Enthusiast.
• Markup vs data by The Perl Shop.
• Joining in the learning process by The Perl Shop.
• Dreaming about by Alex Nedelcu.
• A brighter note by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Doing the Roman thing right by JF Bastien.
• Suitably impressed by Pete Jarvis.
• Infamous book by 🅼🅰🆁🅸🅰🅽.
• On quality in software development by JJ Merelo.
• Did the job by Solomon Foster.
• Let me write x ≠ π*r² by Hillel.
• Could have been by Paul McLeod.
• Are already part of Raku by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• A worthy and modern successor by Felix.
• And what is this? by JJ Merelo.
• Why are they bad for readability? by Jonathan Worthington.
• Introductory workshop by LibreLabGRX.
• Looking forward by Hecatoncheires.
• Book proof finished! by JJ Merelo.
• Struggling to see benefits by Lubos Kolouch.
• Full of? by Paul Cochrane.
• Test your modules! by Alexey Melezhik.
• Plugin to release with App::Mi6 by Alexey Melezhik.
• Documentation scores by JJ Merelo.
• Crossed the magic number again by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Stabilized to 1 per day by JJ Merelo.
• Unpopular language by Solenoid.
• An inkling of Unicode internals by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Not divisible by operator by Markus Holzer.

Comments about Raku

• (Indirectly) started my career by patrick_thompson.
• An extra special call to support Intl::X by L’Alabameñu.
• Light on syntax by dragonwriter.
• Two different comments by Ralph Mellor.
• Two negotiators by Ralph Mellor.

Updated Raku Modules

• Sparrow6 by Alexey Melezhik.
• ake by Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev.
• BigRoot by Julio.
• App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji.
• Inline::Python by Stefan Seifert.
• FixedInt by Steve Schulze.

Winding down

The suspense was killing! Finally the election results are in. Yours truly is happy to have been selected by more 75% of the voters. It is good to know that so many people think you’re doing a good thing for the Raku Programming Language. Thank you! I congratulate the other elected members and look forward to work constructively with them!

Finally, again and again, please don’t forget to stay healthy and to stay safe. Next week there will be more news about Raku. Until then!