Steve Roe expands on the “making the easy things easy and the hard things possible” meme, and explains how the Raku Programming Language “combines an approachable on-ramp for less experienced coders and it offers power developers the keys they need to open up and adapt underlying structures to fit specialised requirements”. Recommended reading (/r/rakulang comments)!

Packaging v2

Claudio Ramirez has re-imagined the packaging of Rakudo on many, many Linux platforms and explains it in a blog post. Of note, it appears that the build time for 25 distro/version combinations is now down to at most 20 minutes, rather than the few hours it used to take before.

Simpler entering of Unicode characters

Florian-pe was getting tired typing character codes in vim to obtain unicode versions of the Raku operators (such as ∈ instead of (elem)). So they made a script to make that easier and a video explaining how it works (/r/rakulang comments).

A simple YouTube bookmark player

Alejandro Gallo has published a blog post about the creation of a simple Raku application for playing music / video from YouTube from a set of bookmarks (/r/rakulang comments).

Contributing for the little ones

Mikhail Khorkov has posted a blog post about how they looked up an old issue, then actually fixed an error in the core of the Rakudo, and wrote tests for it. In Russian, but it appears to be quite readable using Google Translate (/r/rakulang comments). I’d say: more power to the people who’d like to follow suit!

Online Conferencing

The Perl Foundation has announced the dates for the Perl and Raku Conference in the Cloud 2021: 9-11 June 2021 (/r/perl comments). Meanwhile, Andrew Shitov has started a discussion on (also) having an online Raku-only event (/r/rakulang comments). Your input is welcome! And sponsorships as well!

CCR Progress

After about a week of work, the Raku Collect, Conserve, Remaster Project (/r/rakulang comments) has collected and remastered all of Jonathan Worthington‘s blog posts (235 posts spanning more than 14 years). Some of these are merely of historical interest, while others are still more or less up-to-date and could re-published as is. And if you’re worried about the last blog post by Jonathan, be it known they are working on the new-disp branch again and that a new blog post is on the way!

Sadly, the oldest blog posts of Jonathan appear to be lost in the mists of time. Fortunately, Lee Johnson created a static archive of all of former use.perl.org posts in 2018 that has been a treasure trove for posts until 2010. If you have any ideas about how to use the CCR trove of information to make the Raku Programming Language better searchable / findable, or any other ideas / comment, please let us know by creating an issue in the CCR repo (/r/rakulang comments).

Keep those mentors coming!

There’s now a nice list of Google Summer of Code proposals for the Raku Programming Language. But there’s still room for more mentors! So if you think you can be a mentor on any of these projects, let yourself be known!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #100 is available for your perusal.

Pull Requests

• Add support for whitespace-separated CLI options
• Add multilevel list output for Pod::To::Text
• Fix deleting colonpair with R-metaop in value by the Optimizer

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

Core Developments

• Jan-Olof Hendig made sure the latest version of libuv will be used by MoarVM.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added a “slow specializations” section to the standard report generated by the SL (Spesh Log) module.

Questions about Raku

• Concurrency, general guidance on application design by camstuart (/r/rakulang comments).
• Error using zef to install Twitter module by MorayJ.
• Asterisk on DOS command line by Athanasius.
• Best way to check optional module availability by Fernando Santagata.
• (How) does raku do class synonyms? by Steve Roe.
• Scalar slurpies? by Daniel Sockwell.
• Longest match not doing longest match but quits after first match by lisprogtor.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Deployed by puppet and everything! by Jonathan Stowe.
• Bridging for custom Real types by Khalid Elboray.
• Another person in the laboratory by 八雲アナグラ.
• Programming a digital audio server by JJ Merelo.
• Valid code by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Good to see the weekly by Steve Roe.
• Rescuing some Java programmers by Steve Roe.
• Going back to origins or… by Iñigo González.
• Is anyone using Raku? by Aldrin.
• Trait::Traced:api<2> by Ben Davies.
• Fingers crossed by Mohammad S. Anwar.
• A mystery by Julia.
• This is epic by Julia.
• Changed my opinion by Philomæth.
• Developed in parallel by Karl Pettersson.
• Open to other languages Karl Brodowsky.
• Important weights by Mikhail Khorkov.
• Contributing for the little ones by Mikhail Khorkov.
• Loving all the cool features by Salve J. Nilsen.
• Imaginary Impossible by Denis Do Nascimento.
• Less Than Awesome is a bug by Matt Trout.
• No one could implement by しましま.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Tip: Failed to mkdir: Permission denied withRakudoPkgFedora33-2020.12.04.x86_64.rpm by ToddAndMargo.

Comments about Raku

• Arbitrary compile time control of syntax and semantics by Ralph Mellor.
• Destructuring arguments by Ralph Mellor.
• Not strong enough yet by Ralph Mellor.
• The concept of NFG by Donald Hunter.
• A Ship of Theseus by Ralph Mellor.
• Not a thing anymore by dragonwriter.
• Two classes of exceptions by Ralph Mellor.
• Far from design sensibilities by Ralph Mellor.
• Switch away… by prionassembly.
• Misleading by Ralph Mellor.
• On expanding globs on Win32 by Discipulus.
• A response morphed into an article by Ralph Mellor.
• And then there’s… by brudgers.

New Raku Modules

• Math::Libgsl::Combination by Fernando Santagata.
• Date::Calendar::Hijri by Jean Forget.
• Collection by Richard Hainsworth.
• NativeHelpers::iovec by Travis Gibson.

Updated Raku Modules

• ASN::BER by Alexander Kiryuhin.
• Game::Amazing by Arne Sommer.
• Trait::Traced by Ben Davies.
• Terminal::UI, Jupyter::Kernel by Brian Duggan.
• LibXSLT, PDF::Class, PDF::Content by David Warring.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• MessagePack::Class, Manifesto,MQ::Posix, NativeHelpers::Array, AccessorFacade, Chronic by Jonathan Stowe.
• Gnome::Glib, Gnome::N, Gnome::N, Gnome::Gio by Marcel Timmerman.
• Raku::Pod::Render, RakuConfig by Richard Hainsworth.
• HTTP::Tinyish by Shoichi Kaji.
• PDF::Document by Tom Browder.
• Twitter by Nick Logan.
• Terminal::Getpass by Itsuki Toyota.

Winding down

Quite a nice crop of new modules and updated modules, cool blog posts and some cool tooling developments! And quite a lot of remastered content. Again a fruitful week! Please continue to be safe and healthy. If not for yourself, then for next week’s Rakudo Weekly News! 🙂