Jonathan Worthington has posted an extensive blog post about the progress on the new dispatch infrastructure in MoarVM: Raku multiple dispatch with the new MoarVM dispatcher, with exciting new capabilities and the promise of much better performance (Lobsters comments). In related news, Jonathan also reported on the RakuAST progress in March.

Documentation Team

In an attempt to unify work on the documentation of the Raku Programming Language, a new email address has been created to send email to all people involved in documenting Raku: documentation at raku.org. The current members are:

• Richard Hainsworth
• Alexander Kiryuhin
• Elizabeth Mattijsen
• JJ Merelo
• Daniel Sockwell

Please send an email to this email address if you want to be part of these discussions, or if you simply want to raise a documentation issue without wanting (or being able) to make a documentation issue on Github.

In related news: sadly the proposal for the Google Season of Docs for the Raku Programming Language has not been accepted. As to the why, we can only guess as no reason is ever given for non-acceptance.

Tag proposal on Lobsters

A proposal to create a tag (“raku”) for the Raku Programming Language (separate from the “perl” tag), has been proposed on Lobsters (see discussion). Guess we will see a lot more of Raku on that site if the tag is approved.

Vim file extension update

Demostanis has created a Pull Request in the Vim repo to make the Raku file extensions be automatically handled by vim.

Wenzel’s Corner

Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer posted two blog posts this week:

• All your idioms are belong to us
• Coercing the unspeakable

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #109 is available for your perusal. And this week’s “What’s everyone working on (2021.16)” as well.

Pull Requests

• Simplify pow_I and change to never return Nums
• Propagate spesh facts after guard elimination
• Switch MVM_coerce_n_s to Ryū from Grisu3 with a sprintf fallback
• Fix inlines missing synthetic deopt points
• Allow negative Unix (POSIX) values for DateTime instantiation
• Add a repl sub to enter the repl from within a program
• Fix compilation failure with EVAL in precompiled module’s mainline
• Fix ‘too many open files’ during module uninstall
• Give DateTime its own infix:<eqv>

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

Core Developments

• Nicholas Clark micro-optimized stringification of floating point values in nqp.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen changed the Iterator.deterministic method to Iterator.is-deterministic for consistency with is-lazy, made accessing Bags about 60% faster and made fetching the “empty” iterator about 80x as fast.
• Tom Browder tweaked the Rakudo install troubleshooting documentation.
• Daniel Sockwell fixed a recently occurring issue with command line parameters and defaults in MAIN processing.
• And some other fixes and improvements while preparing the next Rakudo compiler release.

Questions about Raku

• Does nativecast() create a new container? by Fernando Santagata.
• Raku Development Process – IRC logging – Where? How? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Easy enforcement of Callable return types by Matthew Stuckwisch.
• What are nqp, nqp-m, rakudo-debug, rakudo-debug-m, rakudo-gdb-m, rakudo-m, rakudo-valgrind-m? by Håkon Hægland.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Promoting Raku by Markus Holzer.
• All the way down! by Steve Scaffidi.
• Not the only one using it by Jonathan Stowe.
• A real one by Stéphane Payrard.
• As a “new” language by Harsh Shandilya.
• Lost in stupid parentheses by Mallory van Achterberg.
• Possible to use… by Julia.
• Why it became the definition by Brad Gilbert.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Comparing Int and Num by sisyphus.
• Slurpy hash signatures by Joseph Brenner.

Comments about Raku

• Fails for other uses by ChrisLomont.
• Add new defaults? by nerdponx.
• A lost decade by dhosek.
• Full on marketing by orev.
• Arbitrary conversions by Ralph Mellor.
• Not unrelated by microtherion.
• Equivalent representations by yellowapple.
• Separating import and export by Ralph Mellor.
• {RFC} Should we “cancel” Perl 7? by Brett Estrade.
• Similar to ratcheting? by Ralph Mellor.
• Should not forget by Chris Tozzi.
• Renaming NQP by Ralph Mellor.
• Sort of the same by Brad Gilbert.

New Raku Modules

• Hematite::Middleware::Session by André Brás.
• Array::Sorted::Util, uniname-words, Hash::Sorted by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Protocol::MQTT, Actor by Leon Timmermans.

Updated Raku Modules

• Terminal::UI, Terminal::ANSI by Brian Duggan.
• PDF, PDF::Class by David Warring.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• LZW::Revolunet by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Gnome::Gdk3, Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::N by Marcel Timmerman.
• zef by Nick Logan & Tony O’Dell.
• HTTP::Parser by Tokuhiro Matsuno.
• fez, Slang::SQL by Tony O’Dell.

Winding down

Jonathan provided us with something to sink our mental teeth into yet again! And some nice new modules! Still important to stay healthy and safe. See you next week for another instalment of the Rakudo Weekly News!