The course of the Raku Programming Language by Andrew Shitov made it to the top 20 of Hacker News and spurred quite a few comments. The first associated Grant Report was also published. Nice to see so much more exposure!

Yanzhan’s Corner

Yanzhan Yang published two videos in the Raku Riddle series:

• Base64 and Ascii85 – Solution to the #2 Riddle for Raku Riddle Contest
• Third riddle

On Air

Joelle Maslak has written an extensive blogpost about how they created an “On Air” light in Making a Linux-Based “On-Air” Light for My Home Office w/ Camera & Google Calendar Integration (associated Raku module: BusyIndicator).

On programminglanguages.info

It looks like the Raku Programming Language made it to the programminglanguages.info website by Ramiro Gómez. The influence network graphic is pretty nice, but what is Self?

Love the language, but…

HortenseAndI has posted a love declaration about the Raku Programming Language on /r/rakulang, but with a twist: Raku is friggin’ slow. Many people reacted to it, with Ralph Mellor‘s comment standing out (as usual).

At #89 in social mentions

TIL that there is a LibHunt Index that monitors social media about mentions of programming languages. The Raku Programming Language is currently at #89. There should be ways to improve that :-).

New blog posts

And again a nice number of interesting blog posts:

• What if I tell you “Sparrow” by Thibault Duponchelle.
• Puttering about with digital signals by Mark Carter.
• Introspective Labeling by Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer.

Weekly Challenge

Weekly Challenge #96 is available for your perusal.

Core Developments

• Patrick Böker changed the way an external program name is specified with the nqp::spawnprocasync op.
• Nicholas Clark implemented the sec, asec and sech functions in terms of other NQP trigonomic functions, improving portability of Rakudo implementations on different backends.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen reverted changes to the REPL (that turned out to cause more issues than that they fixed), introduced the CachedIterator role to speed up those Iterators that already have a cache (such as when iterating over a reified array), and made hash-slice assignment about 1.7x as fast.
• Vadim Belman fixed an issue in error reporting when doing a (failing) test from a different thread.
• And some other smaller fixes and improvements.

Pull Request of the past week:

• Implement explicitly setting arg0 in Procs

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

Questions about Raku

• How to pass pointer to a container from function? by Pawel Pabian.
• How to set a %?RESOURCES key during development? by Richard Hainsworth.
• Running as a service under an unprivileged user by euantor.
• Why is the second say True? by Julio.
• Can I write multiple Type smart matches on one line by Steve Roe.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Removed Travis by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Look at the wings, look at the eyes by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• My number one by Markus Holzer.
• Upload differently? by Joelle Maslak.
• Coolest thing yet by JJ Merelo.
• About 1/4th of the time by JJ Merelo.
• Almost a new language by lem0na.
• Where were you? by Kev ÷ Kev.
• In a meeting indicator by Joelle Maslak.
• A new thing today by Joelle Maslak.
• Setting up actions for my module by brian d foy.
• Let’s compile pugs by 重城良国.
• A complete course by nixCraft.
• So cool by Marco Bellaccini.
• Coughing by JJ Merelo.
• Stillborn by 出来損ない.
• A good place to find answers by Dr. Roy Schestowitz (罗伊).

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Strange behaviour in REPL by Richard Hainsworth.
• Extracting 4 wchar_t‘s from int64 by Paul Procacci.

Comments about Raku

• Another Raku ecosystem browser (/r/rakulang)
• Making it harder by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.
• PGO vs AOT vs JIT by Ralph Mellor.
• The macro sequence by Ralph Mellor.
• Great work! by ilhud9s.
• EmailAddressStringType by Ralph Mellor.
• Attempted with? by Ralph Mellor.
• Thank you for the Recipes by Wendy van Dijk.
• No floats but rationals by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

New Raku Modules

• Terminal::UI by Brian Duggan.
• HarfBuzz::Subset by David Warring.
• Hash::int by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Math::Libgsl::Multiset by Fernando Santagata.
• BusyIndicator by Joelle Maslak.
• Intl::Token::Number, Intl::Format::Number by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.
• RakuConfig by Richard Hainsworth.
• Module2Rpm::Spec by Wolf.

Updated Raku Modules

• Terminal::ANSI by Brian Duggan.
• PDF::Tags, PDF::Grammar by David Warring.
• Math::Libgsl::Matrix by Fernando Santagata.
• Date::Calendar::Julian by Jean Forget.
• Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::N, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Raku::Pod::Render, Pod::From::Cache by Richard Hainsworth.
• JsonC by Salvador Ortiz.
• App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji.
• Text::Utils, Text::Utils, Date::Names by Tom Browder.
• PrettyDump by brian d foy.
• fez by Tony O’Dell.

Winding down

On what a travel agency has dubbed “Blue Monday“, it is indeed hard to not have the feeling of wanting to travel. I guess we will have to make do with a lot of video-conferencing, such as for the Raku Devroom at FOSDEM this year. Meanwhile, it bears repeating, that one should stay safe and stay healthy. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read next weeks Rakudo Weekly News! 🙂