Quite a number of releases this week(end): Alexander Kiryuhin released the Rakudo 2020.10 compiler release, Claudio Ramirez immediately provided many Linux package versions of that release, and JJ Merelo updated the standard Raku Alpine Docker image, as well as the special Raku Alpine Docker Image for testing modules by module developers.

And Patrick Spek also immediately sprang into action by creating a Rakudo Star 2020.10 release. Sadly without a confirmed Windows build: volunteers welcome. And kudos to all who made these releases possible!

Weekly Challenge

Weekly Challenge #84 is available for your perusal. Andrew Shitov did a full review of Challenge #81 as well as a full review of Challenge #82, both with video treatments!

Core Developments

• Nicholas Clark fixed a number of issues with MoarVM on big-endian systems, changed the way unicode information is compiled into MoarVM and made sure some rogue alloc / free calls are properly wrapped in MVM_* macros.
• Ben Davies made sure that the MVM_recalloc function only attempts to zero out memory when it should.
• Will Coleda and Elizabeth Mattijsen documented some more nqp:: ops that weren’t properly documented before.
• Daniel Green added a .gitattributes file to help core developer with git diff.
• Tom Browder made sure that copying from a directory to a file with IO::Path.copy will not clobber the file (as copying from a directory is not supported).
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added a 𝐑𝐚𝐤𝐮𝐝𝐨™ and 𝐑𝐚𝐤𝐮™ welcome message at the request of the TPF lawyer in aid of proper trademark registration. They also made creating a Uni and several methods on native arrays much faster. And introduced support for the prefix || operator inside postcircumfixes (allowing the %h{||@indices} syntax on multi-dimensional hashes and arrays in v6.e).
• Patrick Böker refined the work on the rakuw.exe “window” application.
• Alexandre Jousset fixed an issue that was preventing the Compress::Bzip2 module from being installed.
• Vadim Belman fixed an issue with multi submethods being visible for subclasses.
• And other smaller fixes and improvements.

This week’s new Pull Requests:

• CStruct bind_attribute can write beyond malloc‘d buffer.
• Build: No need to escape " in C code (NQP)
• Implement binding of hash-slices
• Implement binding of array-slices
• Expose nqp::indexingoptimized as Str.no-strands
• Add a Mu ACCEPTS candidate for Mu:D
• Add flag for creating symlinks without absolute path
• Introducing CachedIterator role
• Introducing Seq.slice(indices)
• Build: No need to escape " in C code (Rakudo)

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

Questions about Raku

• Cannot assign an if statement to a variable by anquegi.
• Problem defining postfix operators in REPL by anquegi.
• Difference between Supply method act vs tap by jakar.
• RakuAST – a foundation for Raku macros by ogniloud.
• Unbind or undefine a variable by anquegi.
• Parallelism in Common Sysadmin Tasks? by e-ro_mojosa.
• How do you superimpose two images using MagickWand? by Joseph Brenner.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Fit in a tweet again by Markus Holzer.
• Best bits by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Not mainstream cool by Samuel Chase.
• 𝐹𝑜𝑟 𝖆𝖑𝖑 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝚖𝚊𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚖𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚕 𝕔𝕒𝕤𝕖 𝓾𝓼𝓮𝓼 by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Love this language by JJ Atria.
• Now on https:// by Alexey Melezhik.
• Weird characters by Suman Khanal.
• On value types by JJ Merelo.
• Want a newer language? by Suntamer.

Comments about Raku

• A lot of effort by Stefan Marr.
• Statically parsed by chubot.
• Like for its expressiveness by s-ro_mojosa.
• Apocalyptically wonderful by sergeykish.
• Composing without imposing by Ralph Mellor.
• Look at how they are implemented in Raku by daxim.
• Problematic FatRat by Ralph Mellor.
• Implemented behaviour by syphilis.
• In the same way by mook.

New Raku Modules

• Pakku by Haytham Elganiny.
• hide-methods, Text::MathematicalCase by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Raku Modules

• LibCurl, DB::SQLite, Math::Primesieve by Curt Tilmes.
• Font::FreeType by David Warring.
• Math::Libgsl::LinearAlgebra by Fernando Santagata.
• Algorithm::LBFGS by Itsuki Toyota.
• Keyring by Joelle Maslak.
• Getopt::Long by Leon Timmermans.
• Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.

Winding down

A week without any real blog posts, but with some new Raku modules! And new releases and some interesting new Raku Programming Language features. As always: please don’t forget to stay healthy and to stay safe. And make sure to check in next week for more Raku news!