Jonathan Worthington reports on getting back to working on the RakuAST Grant for the Raku Programming Language, which is great news (/r/rakulang comments)!

Call for Grant Proposals

Only a few days left until the January 2021 Round of Grant Proposals closes. Note that if you can’t make this deadline, you can always submit your proposals for the next round!

German Workshop Online Only

It turns out that it will be impossible to actually visit the German Workshop in person in 2021: it will only be hosted online from 24 to 26 March. A visit to the beautiful city of Leipzig will need to happen in a future instalment, it seems!

New blog posts

• fez|zef – a raku ecosystem and auth by Tony O’Dell.
• FAQ: zef ecosystem by Tony O’Dell (/r/rakulang comments).
• Anonymous slurpers by Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer.
• A new release of Cro::RPC::JSON by Vadim Belman.
• Chain calling by Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #97 is available for your perusal. Yanzhan Yang posted Pascal’s Triangle: Solution to Riddle #3 of the Raku Riddle Contest and posted Riddle #4. And there is an online Raku Study Group (almost) every Sunday hosted by Joseph Brenner.

Core Developments

Sadly it turned out impossible to create a Rakudo Compiler Release this weekend due to technical difficulties regarding testing the module ecosystem. This will most likely mean that there will not be a 2021.01 Release, and that we’ll skip to a 2021.02 release in a few weeks time. What did happen the past week, was:

• Stéphane Payrard removed some more p6 fossils from MoarVM’s internal documentation.
• Stefan Seifert fixed an issue with bounds-checking with Buf.readint16 and friends.
• Ben Davies added some Archetypes stub methods to avoid exceptions on certain types of introspections.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added the SIL (for Spesh Inline Log) module (and a MoarVM::SIL module) for core development purposes. It allows for easier checking on whether a given piece of code will inline certain frames or not. This now makes it possible to actually write tests for inlining (to provide a “canary in the coal-mine” for code refactors that would thwart inlining).
• And some other smaller tweaks and fixes.

Pull Requests of the past week:

• Introduce platform/socket.h
• Make sure we don’t go past stack top

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

Questions about Raku

• Is there a programmatic way to elaborate the ‘half-winds’? by Steve Roe.
• Can a Rakudo Star Bundle install be updated to latest Rakudo compiler binary? by DelinquentAtChores.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Need to get better by Joelle Maslak.
• Effectively disappeared by Naim Matasci.
• Job posting with Raku knowledge as an advantage by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Why the name “fez”? by Dr. Roy Schestowitz (罗伊).
• 100 Points on HackerRank by Alexey Melezhik.
• Net::BGP updated! by Joelle Maslak.
• Recording and uploading for FOSDEM by JJ Merelo.
• A community design by Innovation Quotes.
• New liquidsoap docker image by Jonathan Stowe.
• Executing code with a fixed delay by Mikhail Khorkov.
• Irresistible urge by Solomon Foster.
• It’s a bit psychedelically subtle by ens.
• Not so many dang parentheses! by Joelle Maslak.
• Don’t make it dependent by Dr. Roy Schestowitz (罗伊).
• An entire talk of Lord of the Rings analogies by Jonty Wareing.
• Waiting in 2025 by A. Ron Hubbard.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• A nextsame question by Fernando Santagata.
• List assignment by Brian Duggan.

Comments about Raku

• Access to CPAN by Steve Roe.
• It will seriously pay off by Ralph Mellor.
• The slowest modern programming languages by Mohammed Ayar.
• Stolen all of the best parts by Steve Roe.
• The sum of ecosystems by Ralph Mellor.
• Vastly superior grammar debugging in Comma by Ralph Mellor.
• Stretching the approach to placeholders by Ralph Mellor.
• Multiple constructs for concurrency by Ralph Mellor.
• A fascinating hobby language by deckiedan.
• A different language by Ralph Mellor.
• A new world to play with bu notagoodidea.
• Implementing Raku’s lazy lists in LISP by Lars Malmsteen.
• OK to sow doubt by valenterry.
• Down the road by dragonwriter.
• Practically begging for it by alatennaub.
• On re-inventing wheels by Excalibor.
• Never meant to kill by wheresmycraisin.

Useful Snippets

• Your external IP number by Clifton Wood.

New Raku Modules

• octans by Andinus.
• Math::Libgsl::Eigensystem by Fernando Santagata.
• raku-pod-extraction by Richard Hainsworth.

Updated Raku Modules

• API::Discord, Command::Despatch by Alastair Douglas.
• Game::Amazing by Arne Sommer.
• Terminal::UI, Terminal::ANSI by Brian Duggan.
• PDF::Content, PDF::API6, PDF::Font::Loader by David Warring.
• Math::Libgsl::Constants by Fernando Santagata.
• Console::Blackjack by Greg Donald.
• App::Tasks, Net::BGP by Joelle Maslak.
• Doublephone, Doublephone, Device::Velleman::K8055, GDBM, CheckSocket, Crypt::Libcrypt, Tinky, Audio::Libshout, Sys::Utmp, RPi::Device::SMBus, Log::Syslog::Native, Audio::Encode::LameMP3, Sys::Lastlog, FastCGI::NativeCall, UNIX::Privileges by Jonathan Stowe.
• Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Intl::LanguageTag by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.
• Scheduler::DelayBetween by Mikhail Khorkov.
• zef by Nick Logan; Tony O’Dell.
• Raku::Pod::Render by Richard Hainsworth.
• Pluggable by Robert Lemmen.
• Green, JSON::Path, Template::Protone, Mux, Event::Emitter::Inter-Process, Overwatch, flow, Event::Emitter, Web::Scraper, Text::CSV::LibCSV, Hiker, Bench, fez, System::Query, Data::Dump, Module::Does, Slang::SQL, Encoding::Huffman::PP6, HTML::Parser, DB::ORM::Quicky, Operator::feq, HTML::Parser::XML by Tony O’Dell.

Winding down

In what could be called a quiet week, a massive number of modules got updated. Which is cool to see, an ecosystem in live action! Stay safe and stay healthy, it bears repeating! See you back here for next weeks Rakudo Weekly News! 🙂