Another Raku book just hit the (virtual) bookshelves: Raku Recipes, A Problem-Solution Approach by JJ Merelo, with examples about data science, analytics, microservices, and desktop/console applications usage. Recommended reading and mandatory addition to your programming language bookshelves!

Raku Development Grant Report

Jonathan Worthington reported on the progress of the newdisp branch this last September.

Alexey’s corner

Alexey Melezhik came out with two new Sparrow plugins: jinjalint, for linting Jinja Templates, and tflint for linting Terraform scripts.

Weekly Challenge

Weekly Challenge #83 is available for your perusal. Andrew Shitov did a YouTube review of Challenge #81 task #1 and task #2.

This week, Laurent Rosenfeld almost could not write the blog post because of events in the city where they are a council member. Kudos to Laurent for not being stopped by madmen!

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert, after many hours of painstaking debugging, fixed a long-standing issue with the interning of parametric types in precompilation. Done as part of the work of getting in-process precompilation to work.
• Will Coleda documented some nqp:: ops that weren’t properly documented before.
• Patrick Böker implemented building (on Windows) a rakuw.exe “window” application (as opposed to raku.exe being a “console” application).
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed issues with using set operators with Z and X, and implemented full support for adverbs and partial slices for multi-dimensional arrays and hashes (for v6.e.PREVIEW).
• Alexandre Jousset fixed an issue with NativeCall and C++ that was preventing instantiating a class more than once.
• And some other smaller fixes and improvements.

This week’s new Pull Requests:

• Hash bits in metadata
• Add a function to fix up the STD IO handles
• Replace all simple nqp::if(42,foo,bar) with ternaries
• Add Iterator.deterministic method
• Remove RESTRICTED setting
• Don’t die when using stdout with rakuw.exe

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

Questions about Raku

• Pass an operator like a function by anquegi.
• Is it possible to define a new operator and control its precedence? by Julio.
• How to know which group was captured at an alternation by Julio.
• How do I solve “The iterator of this Seq is already in use”? by mscha.
• How to cycle through list indefinitely and lazily? by grobber.
• Using topic variable (from a for) inside a regex by Julio.
• Perl or Raku for text processing solely? by m-kru.
• Inconsistent longest token matching by Julio.
• How to interpolate string containing capture-group parentheses as regex? by grobber.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Fitted in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• Also interested by isomorphismes.
• Tomty in color! by Alexey Melezhik.
• Make the code more… by e. tadeu.
• Life in 2020 by Brad Gilbert.
• Someone uses it? by Velu Erwan.
• Not quite an evening in the pub by JJ Merelo.
• This doesn’t happen by EricLondo.
• Too interesting to resist by Sourav Datta.
• Using a Pair as a key by Joelle Maslak.
• I just learned by 灰狐.

Comments about Raku

• Write as a Raku grammar by alatennaub.
• Could flow left to right by Ralph Mellor.
• Examples of Object-Oriented Programming by Patrick R.
• Rolled back by Kednicma.
• Pretty easy, at 29 lines by moonchild.

Updated Raku Modules

• Tomty, Sparrow6 by Alexey Melezhik.
• License::Software by Bahtiar Gadimov.
• LibXML, PDF::Class, FDF by David Warring.
• Math::Libgsl::Permutation by Fernando Santagata.
• Gnome::GObject, Gnome::N by Marcel Timmerman.
• DateTime::Timezones by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.
• NativeLibs by Salvador Ortiz.
• File::Copy, Text::Utils, Date::Names by Tom Browder.

Winding down

The first instalment of the Rakudo Weekly News in its second year! With some interesting new Raku Programming Language features! As always, but in this year more specifically: please don’t forget to stay healthy and to stay safe. And don’t forget to check in next week again for more Raku news!