JJ Merelo has taken the initiative (again, so kudos!) to set up a list of Google Summer of Code proposals for the Raku Programming Language. The following proposals have arrived already:

• Create a libgccjit backend for MoarVM’s Just In Time compiler
• Moving Raku to GTK 4.0
• Create a Raku Data Analysis library
• Create a Raku implementation of a gRPC client

Please add your proposals as Pull Requests to the GSOC-2021-ideas repository!

Raku CI integration bot Grant Proposal

Patrick Böker has submitted a Grant Proposal to create a Raku CI Bot to orchestrate the testing process of the Rakudo, NQP and MoarVM projects. Please leave your comments on this project proposal, as it will help the Grants Committee to make a decision!

Comma Community Release

This quarter’s release of Comma Community (the IDE of choice for the Raku Programming Language) brings a number of welcome improvements: new code analyses include annotating calls to deprecated routines (those annotated with the is DEPRECATED trait), passing the wrong number of arguments or mismatched named arguments to a routine, assignment to a readonly parameter, and use of self in a context where it is not available (examples).

Meanwhile, writing code gets more convenient. The ASCII to Unicode conversion support that arrived in the previous release has been extended, and now covers hyper operators and terms like pi. When a call to an unknown sub is detected, there’s now a quickfix to stub it. When a sub is annotated as unused, there are quickfixes to delete it or add the is export trait. A new intention allows switching between fat arrow and colon pair syntax.

Comma’s type inference has improved too, the most visible improvement being that a for loop over a typed array will provide completion and code navigation on the iteration variable based upon the element type. And, as usual, there’s a whole bunch of smaller improvements and fixes across the IDE.

FOSDEM this weekend

Don’t forget to check out the Raku Programming Language presentations in the DevRoom of FOSDEM 2021, this year online on 6 / 7 February!

New blog posts

• If Sets would DWIM by Donald Hunter (/r/rakulang comments).
• DateTime formatting across the world is so beautiful by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.
• Re-release of Cro::RPC::JSON by Vadim Belman.
• 20 Ways of computing factorials in Raku by Andrew Shitov.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #98 is available for your perusal. Yanzhan Yang posted Solution to Riddle #4 of the Raku Riddle Contest and posted Riddle #5.

Core Developments

• Jonathan Worthington has started work on the new-disp branch again (that re-implements the way all dispatching works, fixing several shortcomings and opening the possibility of easier to implement optimizations).
• Patrick Böker made it possible to explicitly set arg0 in Proc objects.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made Date / Datetime .later / .earlier about 50% faster and Date / DateTime .truncated-to upto 19x as fast (depending on what it is being truncated to), and also improved the error reporting on using closed IO::Handle objects.
• Christian Bartolomäus fixed some recent breakage on the JVM backend.
• And some other smaller tweaks and fixes.

Pull Requests of the past week:

• Implement Dateish.earlier / .later with multiple units
• Provide single arg semantics for @array = QuantHash
• Provide $*REPO with an associative interface

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

Questions about Raku

• Getting installation repository by name by Jonathan Stowe.
• Inconsistency/Asymmetry in regexen by par​v『…—​』•·→.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Recipes for ACM Members by ACM Education & Learning Center.
• The optimal language for compbio by Stephen Turner.
• A better checkbuild by Tony O’Dell.
• Getting Rakudo on RPMs by Jonathan Stowe.
• Jumped the shark by Jonathan Stowe.
• 100th Weekly Challenge coming up by Mohammad S. Anwar.
• Tell us about your side|pet|full-time project by JJ Merelo.
• A libgccjit backend by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• A Raku version of Pandas by JJ Merelo.
• A Raku gRPC module by JJ Merelo.
• Love this trick by k-mx.
• Training courses in South-Africa by Jumping Bean.
• Always impressed by Simon Proctor.
• Exportation exploration by JJ Merelo.
• StackOverflow Raku questions status by JJ Merelo.
• Nice to know it’s easy by Simon Proctor.
• Comma 2021.1 is here by Jonathan Worthington.
• Naked on prime time TV by Chris Jack.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• I need help with ~~m/ by ToddAndMargo.
• We need you to propose projects for Google Summer of Code by JJ Merelo.

Comments about Raku

• Why the links aren’t working by andredz.
• Also gone by Reini Urban.
• Nowadays it’s … by benibela.
• Alma is implemented in Raku by Carl Mäsak.
• Absolutely right by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.
• Thought about using Inline::Perl5? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

New Raku Modules

• HarfBuzz by David Warring.
• Intl::Format::DateTime by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.

Updated Raku Modules

• Math::Libgsl::Constants by Fernando Santagata.
• BusyIndicator by Joelle Maslak.
• Igo, App::ModuleSnap, Tinky, IO::Path::Mode, Tinky::JSON by Jonathan Stowe.
• Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::N by Marcel Timmerman.
• DateTime::Timezones by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.
• zef by Nick Logan & Tony O’Dell.
• Raku::Pod::Render by Richard Hainsworth.
• Text::Utils by Tom Browder.
• Shell::Piping by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.
• fez by Tony-O’Dell.
• Array::Sparse, Object::Delayed, WriteOnceHash, Hash2Class, Rake, Interval, Tuple, Array::Circular, Map::Agnostic, ValueTypeCache, Hash-with, ValueType, Array::Agnostic, Hash::Agnostic, ObjectCache, Hash::int by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Winding down

Again a massive number of modules got updated. Not a lot of visual core developments this week, but in the background some amazing work is being done by Daniel Green, Stefan Seifert and Jonathan Worthington. To be reported on soon! In any case, hope to see you back here all safe and healthy for next week’s Rakudo Weekly News!