Jonathan Worthington has just announced the 2020.10 release of Comma, the IDE of choice for the Raku Programming Language. And this release comes with an impressive amount of new features and even direct support for Red, the Raku ORM!

In related news, Alexandr Zahatski has announced a new version of the dedicated Pod6 desktop editor called Podlite. This release supports import from markdown and export to HTML. It’s great to see Pod6 becoming easier and easier to work with for desktop publishing. But also for documenting Raku code as well, of course!

A nice bouquet

This week saw some nice blog posts again:

• Planned obsolence by Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer.
• Dissecting a Raku snippet by JJ Atria (/r/rakulang comments).
• Yet another attempt at Basic/Asm by Mark Carter.
• Blang: addition and subtraction by Mark Carter (/r/rakulang comments).

Please keep those blog posts coming! They’re good exercise for your Raku Advent Calendar post now less than a month away!

From the Raku Steering Council

The Raku Steering Council announces the ejection of Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev from the Raku core team as well as from the Raku Steering Council. In a final word, Aleks-Daniel said:

Having someone in my immediate family pass away recently, I’ve been thinking lately how some things are considered inherently bad or negative, and how we always wish it was possible to turn things around. However, a death can relieve pain and stop suffering, a breakup can create space for new amazing relationships, and a person leaving a team allows both parties to move into differently great directions. I already have two very interesting projects coming up, so in some sense I’m grateful for being able to dedicate myself to them. I hope you are happy for my ejection too, as weird as it sounds 🙂 Let’s hug, say goodbye and move on. There is no need for talk about someone coming back, definitely not one that needs to be written.

Weekly Challenge

Weekly Challenge #85 is available for your perusal.

Core Developments

• Nicholas Clark fixed a recently introduced inefficiency related to NativeCall in MoarVM and made some changes that allow better C compiler optimizations.
• Samantha McVey checked the work by Steve Schulze to update MoarVM to Unicode 13.0 and Emoji 13.1, fixed some minor nits, and merged it.
• Daniel Mita added flag to IO::Path.symlink that allows creation of relative symlinks.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen implemented binding of array and hash slices and fixed some issues in the new @a[;] slicing capabilities in 6.e.PREVIEW. They also introduced a new Routine is test-assertion trait that allows for better error reporting from custom subroutines that perform tests.
• Claudio Ramirez added support for Fedora 33 to the pre-built Rakudo compiler packages.
• And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

This week’s new Pull Requests:

• Fix interning of parametrics
• Eliminate static race condition
• Report the lines that caused coverage
• Make Array.DELETE-POS return Nil on non-existent elements
• Add RAKU_TEST_DIAG_LINE_ON_FAIL
• Update docs/running.pod
• Don’t inherit mixin class language revision

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

Questions about Raku

• Find path to the executing script by Tao Wang.
• Install modules in other rakudo versions using rakubrew by anquegi.
• Does Raku have a similar function to Python’s Struct? by ohmycloudy.
• Case insensitive grammars? by zetaconvex.
• How to generate a lazy division? by metagib.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Smell the flowers by JJ Atria.
• Doing it again by Markus Holzer.
• It’s not! by dijkstrahoareknuth.
• Test your distributions! by Alexey Melezhik.
• Scratching an itch by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Light reading by Simon Proctor.
• A recap by Michael Dexter.
• Just not by default by Ben Davies.

Meanwhile on the mailing-list

• Brace interpolation in strings creates a new scope? by Sean McAfee.
• Metamodel parent and return values … by Paul Procacci.
• Constructing a number from digits in an arbitrary base by Sean McAfee.

Comments about Raku

• As a Rational by Markus Holzer.
• Bad link by minimim.
• On whether parsing is static by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Did not break any code by Ralph Mellor.
• Variety of expression by Ralph Mellor.
• Pretty Amazing by Sal Gunduz.
• Inventing is fine as well by Ralph Mellor.
• Preferred lambda syntax by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Retry by Haytham Elganiny.
• HTTP::Tiny by JJ Atria.
• MIME::Types by Timothy Totten.
• Universal::errno by Travis Gibson.

Updated Raku Modules

• Telegram by Benjamin Frady.
• Gcrypt, GPGME, DB::SQLite by Curt Tilmes.
• Text::MathematicalCase, Sub::Memoized, Hash::Restricted, Array::Circular, Hash::LRU by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Pakku::RecMan, Pakku::Meta, Pakku::Spec, Pakku::RecMan::Client by Haytham Elganiny.
• Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• DateTime::Timezones by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.
• FixedInt by Steve Schulze.
• File::Find by JJ Merelo.
• Test::Async by Vadim Belman.
• Term::Choose, Term::TablePrint by Matthäus Kiem.

Winding down

A busy week again. Glad to see so many new modules and cool core improvements such as Unicode 13.1 support and the new is test-assertion trait that will help module and core developers alike! And a new release of Comma to boot! In the midst of everything else that’s going on in the world. For which yours truly would like you to know: stay healthy and stay safe! Check in next week for more Raku news!