Jonathan Worthington describes the road from the first release five years ago of what is now Raku in Reminiscence, Refinement, Revolution. Reminiscing on the torture of core developers, remaking design decisions, but also about the forging of lifetime friendships. An inspiring blog post in these dark times (/r/rakulang comments)!
Adventing Raku
The other blog posts from the final crop of the Raku Programming Language Advent Posts of 2020!
- What’s the point of pointfree programming? by Daniel Sockwell (comments on /r/rakulang, Lobsters, Tildes).
- Christmas-oriented design and implementation by JJ Merelo.
- Christmas-oriented programming, part deux by JJ Merelo.
Blog Post Dialogue
Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer and Vadim Belman have started an extensive dialogue about the implementation, meaning and use of the new coercion protocol:
- Coercive Files by Wenzel.
- Vadim‘s reply: On Coercion Method Return Value
- Wenzel‘s reply: Assumed Predictability
- Vadim‘s reply again: Runtime vs. Compilation
Of course, other people can chime in as well!
Glot.io supports Raku
Good news from glot.io: it now also properly supports the Raku Programming Language (/r/rakulang comments)!
Weekly Challenge
Weekly Challenge #93 is available for your perusal.
Core Developments
- Nicholas Clark fixed a potential issue that could occur in some cases when all the keys are removed from a hash. They also made sure that builds on the Solaris OS will be recognized once they are supported.
- Elizabeth Mattijsen improved the speed of the basic array Whatever slice (aka
@a[*]) to make it up to about 80x as fast in some scenarios. - And a few other fixes in this quiet week.
This week’s new Pull Requests:
- Change
procspawnasyncto explicitly take the program name - Get MoarVM building on Solaris
- JVM, JS: Change
procspawnasyncto explicitly take the program name - Implement
is implementation-detailfor classes - Fix calling programs with spaces in their path on Windows
Please check them out and leave any comments that you may have!
Questions about Raku
- How to use capturing group inside lookbehinds by Julio.
- Fixing Raku Unicode display issues on Windows by 5ab5traction5 (/r/rakulang comments).
- Assignment to a List Container Confusion by Steve Roe.
- How can you unbox the assignment to the value of a
Hash? by JJ Merelo. - Need advice for my dissertation about Raku’s concurrency by Vivelakira (/r/rakulang comments)
Meanwhile on Twitter
- Testing your modules back to 2019 by JJ Merelo.
- Hastening its demise by Christopher D. Long (Кристофер Октонион Лонг).
- Without identifiers by JJ Merelo.
- Seen this before? by Curtis Poe.
- Creating universal binaries by Stéphane Payrard.
- Different name for the invocant by Timo Paulssen.
- 6 years experience by Azul Inho.
- What is point free programming? by JJ Merelo.
- Problem solving bits by Salve J. Nilsen.
- Still very useful and accurate by Stéphane Payrard.
- A tricky exercise by Julio.
- Getting to 6 stars by Joelle Maslak.
- Online services supporting Raku as of Christmas 2020 by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
- Two parts agile programming by JJ Merelo.
- Happy anniversary! by JJ Merelo.
- Nightly image building by JJ Merelo.
- The next 100 years by £€$$? ▼ ¥€$! ¡𝙽𝚘 𝙿𝚊𝚜𝚊𝚛𝚊́𝚗!.
- 15 Minutes by Kang-min Liu.
- Can we stop hating? by Stefan de Lange.
- Past inertia by Suman Khanal.
- With a little bit of luck by Josselin.
Comments about Raku
- Same way as Perl? by Don Coyote.
- Multiple dispatch rules by ineffective_topos.
- On
NativeCallandInlines by Ralph Mellor. - A Slang with it by Ralph Mellor.
- Important people by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
- Nested loop breaks by Ralph Mellor.
New Raku Modules
Updated Raku Modules
- Terminal::ANSI by Brian Duggan.
- DB::Pg by Curt Tilmes.
- LibXML, PDF::Font::Loader, LibXML by David Warring.
- GTK::Simple by Richard Hainsworth.
- Path::Finder by Leon Timmermans.
- Gnome::N, Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
- Text::Markov, JSON::RPC by Paweł Pabian.
- Prime::Factor by Steve Schulze.
Winding down
It was special to see that the number of Rakoons on /r/rakulang reached 666 on Christmas. If that isn’t a good sign 🙂 . Meanwhile, yours truly will take some time off from publishing the Rakudo Weekly News, so there will not be an issue on the 4th of January. So see you in two weeks for the first issue of the Rakudo Weekly News of 2021 on the 11th of January. Please stay safe and healthy. And have a good time nonetheless!
Rakudo Weekly News 