Alexander Kiryuhin has announced the Rakudo Compiler 2021.04 Release. A little later than originally planned, because some issues were discovered that needed to be fixed, either in core or in the ecosystem. Kudos to Alexander and all the other people that worked on this release!

This release comes with new IO::Path methods, and support for Julian Dates in the DateTime class, and a now term that is 38x as fast. Also many stability and speed improvements and other assorted features and fixes. JJ Merelo‘s Alpine-raku docker containers are also updated, as well as the Rakudo Linux Packages (now also including *buntu 21.04) by Claudio Ramirez. A new Rakudo Star release should be available soon.

Wenzel’s Corner

Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer only posted one blog post this week: Reusing a wheel.

Community Affairs Team

The Community Affairs Team of Yet Another Society (aka the Perl Foundation) has published a report about two investigations about an individual in the community (/r/rakulang comments).

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #110 is available for your perusal. And this week’s “What’s everyone working on (2021.17)” as well.

Pull Requests

• Use correct size for size argument to send()/write()
• Fix spesh missing writes to containers
• Fix missing gc_mark of simstackframe‘s arg_types
• Accurately calculate pow_n(10.0, $exp) for floating point sprintf formatting
• Revert “Lazy allocation of HashMap for VMHash storage on JVM.”

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

Core Developments

• Daniel Green did a lot of work streamlining the Azure CI pipelines and gave DateTime its own eqv candidates.
• Stefan Seifert made sure that inlining also takes synthetic de-optimization points into consideration and fixed some doubly rooted variables in MoarVM. They also fixed a long standing issue with regards to using EVAL in the mainline of a precompiled module.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen changed SlippyIterator.is-deterministic to always return False, and also reverted subclassability of infix:<~> and List.join to await a further definition on the exact semantics.
• And some other smaller fixes and tweaks that made it to the release.

Questions about Raku

• Can I introspect a Regex‘s interpolated value? by Daniel Sockwell.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Named Tuple in Raku by Jonathan Stowe.
• Assymmetry as a feature by Michael Schaap.
• Cool SQL Slang by JJ Merelo.
• Anything other than 7 by Joaquin Ferrero.
• Banned by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Called Raku now by JackFly26.
• Prodfiler support by Salve J. Nilsen.
• Thank you, Perl-Services! by The Raku Conference.
• Guess Who! by Microsoft Developer UK.
• Some Love! by Joelle Maslak.
• Not even wrong by Leon Timmermans.
• First Raku Conference by Suman Khanal.
• Awesome Unicode support by Suman Khanal.
• Never arrived by Eric Pugh.
• Talk wanted by The Raku Conference.
• Many wishes already supported by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• A crazy idea by Цифругл.
• Like BagHashes by Christopher Bottoms.
• Talk approved for LambdaintheAlhambra! by JJ Merelo.
• Guest contributions picking up by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Added in 2020 by Julia.
• #110 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• gather take eager syntax by Norman Gaywood.

Comments about Raku

• Nothing panned out? by Ralph Mellor.
• Shortest possible alias by Ralph Mellor.
• Operators are just functions by Ralph Mellor.
• A case study by Ralph Mellor.
• Lexical refinements by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Only partially open source by Ralph Mellor.
• Significantly different by Brad Gilbert.
• Being able to choose your style by Ralph Mellor.
• On swearing by or at it by Ralph Mellor.
• When interested in MoarVM only by Ralph Mellor.
• A grammar for your toy PL by Ralph Mellor.
• Never based on Perl by Ralph Mellor.
• Think Raku by birriel.

New Raku Modules

• IRC::Client::Plugin::Logger, IRC::Log::Colabti by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Raku Modules

• Terminal::ANSI by Brian Duggan.
• CSS, CSS::Specification, PDF, CSS::Properties, CSS::Grammar, CSS::Writer, CSS::Module by David Warring.
• Interval by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Tinky by Jonathan Stowe.
• Gnome::Gdk3, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.

Winding down

It’s always nice to be able to report on a new release! The work of many volunteers frozen into a form that can be easily used by others. And with some nice stability and speed improvements to boot! But I digress. See you next week for another instalment of the Rakudo Weekly News! Until then, stay healthy and stay safe!