Elizabeth Mattijsen has started the Raku Collect, Conserve, Remaster Project to collect old blog posts from the 20+ year history of Raku, into a repository with the goal of preserving all of the information in these blog posts (many of which have already disappeared from the directly accessible internet). If you know of old blog posts (possibly your own), please create a PR to have them added to the Collect phase of the CCR project. The preliminary results are Remastered blog posts in markdown format, that can be rendered at a later stage to provide more up-to-date Raku content on the Internet (/r/rakulang comments).

Keep those ideas coming!

The list of Google Summer of Code proposals for the Raku Programming Language has become larger. These proposals were added last week:

• Tooling for testing and releasing Rakudo Star
• Inline::Python (3) update
• Add missing encodings to MoarVM
• Add native small integer support to MoarVM
• Raku Module Chain Introspection

If you have any ideas for GSoC projects, please add your proposals as Pull Requests to the GSOC-2021-ideas repository!

FOSDEM last weekend

FOSDEM 2021 is over, and the Online DevRoom was a success! Although initially the Q&A sessions could only be done in text-chat, during the day the situation improved and presenters could reply to questions “in person” that were asked in the text-chat. All in all it was a pretty positive experience. Sadly, the videos have not yet officially appeared on the FOSDEM website, but since all presentations had to be pre-recorded and uploaded, the chance that FOSDEM will lose them, should not be that great.

Wanna make a living doing Raku?

Surely, there aren’t a lot of places where your experience with the Raku Programming Language will be appreciated, YET. Atikon is still searching for a software developer, and your experience with Raku would be considered an advantage! It’s maybe time to start thinking of setting up a jobs.raku.org website. In any case, if you know of any other job advertisements that mention Raku, please let yours truly know so that they can be included in the Rakudo Weekly News!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #99 is available for your perusal. Yanzhan Yang has not posted a solution to Riddle #5 yet.

Pull Requests

To give Pull Requests of other Raku / Rakudo related repositories more exposure, these will now also be listed in this section.

• Add Code of Conduct and Incident Response Guide
• Largely rework the Object Tutorial
• Remove a spesh optimization if it has too many deopts

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

Core Developments

• The work that Daniel Green started last September to convert spesh objects to have their own REPR that can be garbage collected, was finally merged: that was a *lot* of work that will pay off not only now, but also makes a lot of other MoarVM infrastructure now more easily implementable.
• Stefan Seifert fixed several (rare) opportunities for creating segfaults in spesh and repossession of native call sites.
• Christian Bartolomäus made the nqp::execname op available on the JVM backend, and revived make test on the JVM backend as well by not using the EvalServer by default.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added support for Date / DateTime.earlier / later to take multiple units in order, and made sure that storing QuantHashes in arrays / hashes now follow the single argument rule. They also worked on spesh log introspection with the MoarVM::Spesh module, and introduced an SL core development worker class to quickly generate a spesh log report for a given piece of code.
• Vadim Belman fixed an issue with error reporting for failed tests.
• And some other smaller tweaks and fixes.

Questions about Raku

• Why nothing happened after selecting “Convert operators to Unicode” in Comma? by chenyf.
• Cannot interpolate trying to emulate EXPORT_OK Tag by Jean-Yves Daniel.
• What’s the difference between my and our? by uzlxxxx.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Main programming language by Khalid Elboray.
• DIY rename by brian d foy.
• Seems difficult to implement by Miura Hideki.
• What would make a productive Raku year by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• On Web Audio Services by Konstantin Narkhov.
• No-one is using my module by Jonathan Stowe.
• Set up a Jitsi room by Salve J. Nilsen.
• Extremely expressive by JJ Merelo
• Yet Another Type Of Infinite Loop by əric.
• A great introduction by JJ Merelo.
• Spanish loops by JJ Merelo.
• A really interesting language by Jens Petersen.
• 98.1 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• How is this addressed? by Daniel Lombraña  🦇.
• 98.2 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• They do not cheat by Jorge Juan.
• Please join us! by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• char as grapheme cluster? by namibj.
• On hurting/improving adoption by Dave Bolger.
• In production now by JJ Merelo.
• Gave up every time by Su-Shee.
• My FOSDEM talks by Curtis Poe.
• Be a love by Jonathan Stowe.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• REPL-specific issue with stored regex variable? by William Michels.
• Dimensions in a multidimensional array by Theo van den Heuvel.

Comments about Raku

• On operator overloading by inskey_.
• On Signature and Capture by Ralph Mellor.
• Is Raku small? by ruivieira.
• A modernized commercial Lisp by nerdponx.
• Closer to $_ by moonchild.
• Arbitrary control over syntax and semantics by Ralph Mellor.
• On conditional deletion by Ralph Mellor.
• On destructuring by Ralph Mellor.
• Notations for regular expressions by honestSalami.
• Cryptographic by aelmetwaly.

New Raku Modules

• Math::Libgsl::Interpolation by Fernando Santagata.
• Lumberjack::Dispatcher::EventSource, Lumberjack::Message::JSON by Jonathan Stowe.
• Intl::CLDR by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.

Updated Raku Modules

• Terminal::UI by Brian Duggan.
• HarfBuzz, Font::AFM by David Warring.
• Object::Delayed by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Lumberjack::Application, Lumberjack, Lumberjack::Dispatcher::Syslog, Acme::Insult::Lala, JSON::Marshal, JSON::Class, JSON::Infer, Attribute::Lazy, DateTime::Format by Jonathan Stowe.
• Gnome::Glib, Gnome::Glib, Gnome::Gio, Gnome::N by Marcel Timmerman.
• Intl::Format::Number, Intl::Format::DateTime by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.
• Raku::Pod::Render, raku-pod-extraction by Richard Hainsworth.
• Shell::Piping by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.

Winding down

Some very interesting new modules, quite a few modules updated, and interesting core developments, some of which were underway for months! And a hopefully interesting project trying to preserve parts of Raku’s legacy. And a pleasant online FOSDEM. All in all a fruitful week! See you back here all safe and healthy for next week’s Rakudo Weekly News!