JJ Atria just announced another part of the Raku Programming Language’s growing support for games: POP, an experimental 2D game development framework. It has been inspired by frameworks like LÓVE2D and Pico-8, and by others of a similar nature. Meanwhile, it turns out that this work is complementary to Geoffrey Broadwell‘s MUGS (Multi-User Gaming Services) project. Which made it the right time to start a new IRC channel dedicated to game development using the Raku Programming Language: #raku-gamedev on Freenode.

First Raku-CI Bot Grant Report

Patrick Böker has published their first grant report for the Raku Continuous Integration Bot Grant: it gives an introduction to Patrick, the problem space, the plan and the next steps to be taken. It’s cool to see the project taking off (/r/rakulang comments)!

Season of Docs

JJ Merelo has initiated a formal request to improve the documentation of the Raku Programming Language for the Google Season of Docs (/r/rakulang comments).

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #106 is available for your perusal. And this week’s “What’s everyone working on (2021.13)” as well.

Pull Requests

• Remove nqp::time_(i|n) in favor of nqp::time… (MoarVM)
• Fixes for NULL bugs / spesh bugs / wrong backtraces
• Use new nqp::time instead of nqp::time_(i|n) (nqp)
• Set “allocate in gen2” while creating objects that are permarooted
• Use new nqp::time instead of nqp::time_(i|n) (rakudo)

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

Core Developments

• Ben Davies made sure that C-pointer serialization is constrained to a maximum of 32 bits.
• Stefan Seifert fixed another nest of race conditions and GC issues in MoarVM, NQP and Rakudo, and fixed an issue with improper inlining of blocks that shouldn’t because they have phasers in them.
• Daniel Green improved the speed of truthy checks on arrays in whiles and ifs in NQP.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added a .user and .group method to IO::Path, made the Str.wordcase method and initialization of QuantHashes about 5x as fast, and reduced the overhead of many builtin subs, such as open(),
• Nicholas Clark removed two obsolete compatibility wrappers.
• Vadim Belman fixed an issue with integration of NQP classes into Rakudo.
• Christian Bartolomäus identified a regression on the JVM backend (now fixed).
• And various other fixes and improvements.

Questions about Raku

• Trying to get Red see the schema by tomgracey.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Season of Docs attempt by JJ Merelo.
• Some pretty insane things by mempko.
• Help as a volunteer? by JJ Merelo.
• Nice trolling by Martin A. Brooks.
• Nearly exclusively switched by Jonathan Stowe.
• Additional info on Jonathan by Reneé Backer.
• In the next Comma release… by Jonathan Worthington.
• But Raku has it! by Joel Berger.
• Working on WebService::Github by Khalid Elboray.
• Taken that approach by JJ Merelo.
• The desert of the real! by JJ Atria.
• A deep dive by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Challenge 106.1 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• Challenge 106.2 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• Five most uncommon letters by Raku Magic.
• Flippant by Stéphane Payrard.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Grammar performance fix by yary.

Comments about Raku

• Made a lot of sense by Daniel Sockwell.
• The future of Perl (HackerNews discussion, much about Raku).
• Embracing it up front by bryanlarsen.
• More correct than any by patrickas.
• Your own language in under 5 minutes by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• TOML by Tony O’Dell.
• POP by JJ Atria.

Updated Raku Modules

• Curlie, Terminal::UI by Brian Duggan.
• PDF::Font::Loader, CSS::Properties, CSS, PDF::Content, PDF::Class by David Warring.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• BusyIndicator by Joelle Maslak.
• Crypt::SodiumPasswordHash, RedX::HashedPassword by Jonathan Stowe.
• Gnome::GObject by Marcel Timmerman.
• Raku::Pod::Render, Collection by Richard Hainsworth.
• App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji.
• Shell::Piping by Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer.

Winding down

More gaming! Again, it’s good to see Raku being used for fun and profit. Please check in again next week for another instalment of the Rakudo Weekly News! Healthy and safe, please!