Next year’s FOSDEM will be an online event only, on 6/7 February 2021. It will also have a Raku Programming Language DevRoom track, shared with Perl. Please contact JJ Merelo (on Twitter or on the #raku IRC channel) if you are interested in giving a presentation about your experiences with Raku!

Comma Complete Released

Alexander Kiryuhin has announced a new Comma Complete release, the Raku IDE of choice.

Advent around the Corner

It’s that time of the year again, the Raku Advent Calendar is about to start! Be sure to check out the posts in the days to come!

Module Adoption Center

The Raku Module Adoption Center has been cleaned up: URLs and descriptions have been updated to mention the Raku Programming Language. There are now 102 distributions in the Raku Ecosystem awaiting your adoption. If you are a user of any of these modules, please consider adopting them so you also can be assured of its correct functioning in the future!

Dumping Partitions

Mark Carter has blogged about a little Raku script that they use to dump the partition table of a disk.

Weekly Challenge

Weekly Challenge #89 is available for your perusal. And Andrew Shitov is this month’s Weekly Champion. Check out the interview!

Core Developments

• The massive work that Nicholas Clark did in the past months, improving the efficiency and stability (in light of multi-threading) of hashes, was finally merged into MoarVM. They also improved NativeCall with regards to getting the current thread context.
• Ben Davies added some return value macros to the lego JIT.
• Stefan Seifert worked on making serialization errors more recoverable and fixed several issues with multiple pre-compilations (parallel or serial) within a single process.
• Daniel Green provided an optimization in hash handling if there are no keys in the hash.
• Vadim Belman worked on improving the performance of code that was negatively affected performance-wise by the new coercion-protocol and succeeded in restoring most of the previous performance for some typical workloads.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen improved the sensitivity of Supply.batch(:seconds) to milliseconds, and fixed several action-at-a-distance problems with some IO::Spec methods.
• Leon Timmermans fixed a problem in the creation of CompUnit::Repository::Distribution.WHICH.
• Peter du Marchie van Voorthuysen made cas() about 15% faster again.
• And quite a few smaller fixes and improvements.

This week’s new Pull Requests:

• Improve performance of repeated unshifting
• Make mixins concurrency safe
• Add :emit-timed to Suppy.batch(:$seconds)
• Give stub packages created by package_at_key a proper longname
• Adapt filenames in binary release scripts

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

Questions about Raku

• How do you make HTTP requests? by Josh.
• Maintain python virtual environment across shell commands by Tao Wang.
• Why is it 1? by Andrew Shitov.
• Language + Language = ? (CLDR feedback request) by alatennaub.
• Pesky Bothersome BOOTInt by Clifton Wood.
• Parametrized types, how to use run time values as parameters by JJ Merelo.
• Concatenating s/// by margolari.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Bought with a discount by k-mx.
• Some Raku-code examples by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Better to golf with by k-mx.
• Regexps are actually simple by evilsocket.
• Writing as Prolog by Simon Proctor.
• That’s why I wrote Monotonic by Joelle Maslak.
• Test your distributions on RakuDist! by Alexey Melezhik.
• How about … by Timo Paulssen.
• Inviting your feedback by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Past World War? by まきのっぴ.
• It was! by Andrew Shitov.
• Going back more than 10 years by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Like Moose by Chris Prather.
• Don’t hesitate to check the draft by Konstantin Narkhov.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• The ,= operator by Joseph Brenner.
• IO::Socket::Async::SSL on new Linux by Mark Devine.

Comments about Raku

• The ideal programming language by Ralph Mellor.
• Opinion of a crappy programmer by Gixx.
• What is multiple dispatch by edpresso.
• As first-class citizen by rbonvall.
• Fails to compile by Ralph Mellor.
• Managed to release it by oblio.
• Grammar to say hello by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• META6::Query, FileSystem::Helpers by Ben Little.
• GLFW by Ryan S. Northrup.

Updated Raku Modules

• API::Discord by Alastair Douglas.
• Stache by Ben Little.
• eigenstates by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• CRDT by Fernando Correa.
• IO::Socket::Async::SSL by Jonathan Worthington.
• App::Lorea, HTTP::Tiny, HTTP::Tiny by José Joaquín Atria.
• TrigPi by Lucien Grondin.
• Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::N by Marcel Timmerman.
• Matrix::Client by Matias Linares.
• App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji.
• Terminal::Getpass by Itsuki Toyota.

Winding down

Just in time for a new Comma release. Always cool! Again a week with some impressive core improvements that have taken months to put together. And some blogs post, but most of them will probably appear in the next 25 days as part of the Raku Advent Calendar. Meanwhile, stay safe and stay healthy!