Longtime Raku developer Geoffrey Broadwell has released a platform for game service development called MUGS (Multi-User Gaming Services). It is intended for creating client-server and multi-user games by abstracting away the boilerplate of managing player identities, tracking active games and sessions, sending and receiving messages and actions, and so forth.

It is based on Cro, a set of Raku libraries for building reactive distributed systems. And already at release 0.1.0! Great to see yet another cool development in the Raku Programming Language! (/r/rakulang comments).

Rakudo Compiler 2021.03 released

Alexander Kiryuhin has done it again. Another Rakudo Compiler Release on the dot, like clockwork: Rakudo 2021.03, with some nice additions, fixes and performance improvements. Binary packages are already available: John Longwalker even blogged about them in “Overdue Appreciation for rakudo-pkg“.

Comma in (p)review

Jonathan Worthington looked back on a year of Comma (the Raku Programming Language IDE) and what can be expected of Comma in 2021 in Comma in 2020: a year in review. With some cool animations and examples of amazing Comma features (/r/rakulang comments).

February Grant Report

Jonathan Worthington also reported on their work in February 2021 on the new dispatch mechanism for the Raku Development Grant (/r/rakulang comments).

Covid Observer

Thanks to the inattentiveness of yours truly, the first year anniversary of Andrew Shitov‘s Covid Observer was missed in last week’s Rakudo Weekly News. My apologies! Please use the “weekly: message” feature on the #raku IRC channel to make sure your announcements won’t be missed.

Alternate Raku website

CIAvash has made their proposal for a new Raku website public, which also contains a Persian language version (/r/rakulang comments).

Improved Emacs support

CIAvash also blogged about their improved flycheck-raku for melpa (/r/rakulang comments).

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #105 is available for your perusal. And this week’s “What’s everyone working on (2021.12)” as well.

Pull Requests

• Add a setup_notify handler and queue to nqp::signal
• fastcreate Int and BigInt objects from IntConstCache metadata
• Set “allocate in gen2” in 2 locations that create permarooted objects.
• Fix race condition when setting up continuation in ThreadPoolScheduler
• Make signal handler setup synchronous to avoid race conditions
• Make eqv op for Parameter consider subsignatures too
• Add IO::Path.user / group methods
• Remove two five-year-old compatibility wrappers

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

Core Developments

• Nicholas Clark eliminated the nqp ops sec_n, asec_n and sech_h as they are no longer used.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made the xx operator on constant values about 5% faster, and implemented an OperatorProperties class on the rakuast branch.

Questions about Raku

• Future backends for NQP and Raku? by s-ro_mojosa.
• Advice needed for preventing file descriptor leaks by cowbaymoo.
• Enforcing API boundaries at the Module (Distribution?) level by Daniel Sockwell.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• MUGS is out! by JJ Merelo.
• Improved flycheck-raku by Siavash.
• A wrong answer by Joaquín Ferrero.
• Black history by 九八式計算機.
• Persian Raku by CIAvash.
• Nim AI by Simon Proctor.
• Rolling Bool by Raku Magic.
• Learning Raku by books by Christopher E. Stith.
• Retconned by Scott Williams.
• A way to make Raku faster by Simon Proctor.
• New parser stuff by Michael Van Veen.
• Planned for 2021 by Jonathan Worthington.
• Name change soon by 齊藤 (tails).
• Taking you seriously by Brian Wisti.
• The many ways… by Simon Proctor.
• Crafting Interpreters fixed by Julia.
• At dylang conferences by SunStar Systems.
• Microservices happened by SunStar Systems.
• Alpine updated by JJ Merelo.
• Avoiding camera indication by Joelle Maslak.
• Ad hoc multiple inheritance, but… by mcc.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Too many file handles by Richard Hainsworth.

Comments about Raku

• The current state of Perl by Dave Cross.
• Tickles me the right way by orac1e.
• An actual use for ::?CLASS by alatennaub.
• Reasoning behind $ and @ by uid1357.
• On constructing a type by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Pastebin::Pasteee by Khalid Elboray.
• Intl::LanguageTaggish, Intl::LanguageTag::Simple by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.
• Math::FractionalPart by Tom Browder.

Updated Raku Modules

• Hematite by André Brás.
• Terminal::ANSI, Terminal::UI by Brian Duggan.
• CSS, CSS::Grammar, CSS::Properties by David Warring.
• Text::CSV by H.Merijn Brand (Tux).
• Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::Gio, Gnome::Glib by Marcel Timmerman.
• Config by Patrick Spek.
• Archive::SimpleZip by Paul Marquess.
• Collection-Raku-Documentation by Richard Hainsworth.
• String::Splice by Steve Schulze.
• Template::Mustache by Tim Smith & Richard Hainsworth.
• ABC by Solomon Foster.

Winding down

Again, an action packed week at the Rakudo Weekly News! And since gaming is serious business, it’s good to see Raku being used for fun and profit. Please continue to stay safe and stay healthy! If not for yourself and your loved ones, then for another instalment of the Rakudo Weekly News next week!