About a year ago, the first Rakudo Weekly News hit the Net, shortly after the name change to Raku was officially accepted. It’s quite amazing how much has been achieved in the year since then. The extensive documentation has been updated, many (not yet all though) internals have been updated, several Raku books have been published, over 1500 Raku questions on StackOverflow, a lively /r/rakulang subreddit with more than 600 users, and a lively #rakulang Twitter feed as well!

Yours truly is looking forward for another year of progress, more focused on internals (like the rakuast and newdisp branches), rather than on the externals (how a programming language should be called).

A Third Manifesto

After part 1 of a Raku Manifesto and part 2 of a Raku Manifesto, this week Daniel Sockwell concluded this very interesting and thought provoking cycle of blog posts with part 3 of a Raku Manifesto. In it, Daniel gives examples of how open source projects are outperforming many similar projects backed by large corporations, and how excited Daniel is about the Raku Programming Language (/r/rakulang comments).

RakuAST Grant Report

Jonathan Worthington reported on the progress of the RakuAST Grant work, with an impressive list of features now supported (/r/rakulang comments).

From the Raku Steering Council

Vadim Belman has accepted the seat (/r/rakulang comments) left open by Jonathan Worthington, who has indicated that they need a break from Rakudo core development, and consequently also from the Raku Steering Council for personal health reasons (/r/rakulang comments).

Meanwhile, Daniel Sockwell has been working with lawyers at Yet Another Society (also known as The Perl Foundation) to handle potential issues with regards to having a powerful “Raku” trademark.

Flowers

This week saw only a few blog posts, so not enough for a bouquet:

• Development workflow management using Tomtit by Alexey Melezhik (/r/rakulang comments).
• Sneaky Arguments by Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer.
• Sparrow plugin to search / check resources in Azure resource group by Alexey Melezhik.

Weekly Challenge

Weekly Challenge #82 is available for your perusal. And Andrew Shitov did a full review of the Raku solutions of Challenge #80 (including the usual video run-through).

Core Developments

• A long standing Pull Request by Leon Timmermans about bundling arguments in the default MAIN argument parser, with some final fixes by Patrick Böker, made it into the main branch.
• Patrick Böker fixed the build logic to dis-allow building with an incorrect NQP version.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made deleting a non-existent key from a Hash about 40% faster, and made multi-level hash accesses (aka %h{1;2;3}) about 30% faster.
• And some other smaller fixes and improvements.

This week’s new Pull Requests:

• Allow --repl-mode even with parameters
• Make is rw on parameters of MAIN worry
• Fix for issue with Z / X with set operators
• Add sanity check in infix handling, fixes R#3949
• Implement the prefix:<||> operator in postcircumfixes
• Make Hash.DELETE-KEY return Nil on non-existent keys

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

Questions about Raku

• Why am I not allowed to break a Promise? by jakar.
• Is there a name for the .+ method call operator? by tobotic.
• Pure XML library? by pmf.
• Command-line arguments for REPL? by zeekar.
• Where can I find a Raku core dump file? by lisprogtor.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• May be? by Damien Petrilli.
• A few generations behind by jsoner.
• For personal projects by Marc Chantreux.
• A suggestion from a few weeks ago by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Express review by Andrew Shitov.
• For all my vaporware! by the Notorious V.A.L..
• Moving to 1 by Salve J. Nilsen.
• Reading the wiki first by Jonas Berlin.
• Most desired by Deborah A. Lapeyre.
• Separate them by Julio.
• Fibonaccis by Suman Khanal.
• Login to Azure by Alexey Melezhik.
• Check Azure resources by Alexey Melezhik.
• Seems to have renamed by 売切くろねぷ.
• Took it to the head by Markus Holzer.

Meanwhile on the mailing-list

• Language Design: ‘special casing’ of split()? (i.e. .split performsconcomitant .join? ) by William Michels.
• cross reduce operator magic by Cezmi Pastirma.

Comments about Raku

• No dynamic parsing by chubot.
• Raku (laughs) by Tyler Cowen.
• Implementation of lazy evaluation on Wikipedia.
• Functional programming on Wikipedia.

New Raku Modules

• silently, eigenstates by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Math::Libgsl::Histogram by Fernando Santagata.

Updated Raku Modules

• Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::GObject by Marcel Timmerman.
• zef by Nick Logan, Tony O’Dell.
• Pod::To::HTML by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• IO::Socket::SSL by Nick Logan.
• Router::Right by Konstantin Narkhov.

Winding down

A whole year has passed for the Weekly. How Raku and the world has changed in those twelve months: Raku for the better, the world for worse. Which brings yours truly to tell you: please don’t forget to stay healthy and to stay safe. And to check in next week for more news about the Raku Programming Language!