Jonathan Worthington has just announced a new release of Comma (the IDE for the Raku Programming Language), both the paid version as well as the free Community Edition! With a lot of new pod related features, support for meta-class methods (handy if you’re using Red), and a nice bunch of bug fixes and other improvements.

If you like the Comma Community Edition, consider buying the Comma Complete Edition with additional features: it will pay for further development of the free version as well as for future complete editions!

Rakudo Star 2021.04

And in more release news: Patrick Spek announced the Rakudo Star 2021.04 Release, the distribution of the Raku Programming Language with batteries included!

Wenzel’s Corner

Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer again only posted one blog post this week: The absence of a riddle.

Update by Community Affairs Team

The Community Affairs Team of Yet Another Society (aka the Perl Foundation) has published an update to the last report 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 (2021.18)” as well.

Pull Requests

• Suggest moving IRC logs to “raku” organisation
• Submodule default shallow clone
• Add tracy as a submodule and build option
• Remove unnecessary Windows specific tasks from CI
• Fix heap-use-after-free in t/spec/S17-promise/nonblocking-await.t
• Add method posix-real to show posix value with fractional seconds
• Replace use of P6EX hllsym with Metamodel::Configuration.throw_or_die
• [JVM] Make make test work again

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

Core Developments

• Daniel Green fixed a casting issue with MoarVM’s write / send routines.
• Patrick Böker added a test configuration for MinGW on Windows and an issue with packaging modules.
• Christian Bartolomäus fixed a long standing issue with pre-compilation on the JVM backend, continued their work to make make test work on the JVM backend again.
• Nicholas Clark added a tool to generate code to make nqp::pow_n calculate more accurately.
• Maxim Kolodyazhny fixed some formatting errors in the 2021.04 release description.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed handling of lc|uc|tc|tclc|fc|flip methods on allomorphs.

And some more smaller fixes and improvements. In related news, Claudio Ramirez informs us that support for Fedora 34 has been added to rakudo-pkg.

Meanwhile Jonathan Worthington added support for compilation of the following Raku language features in the rakuast branch:

• ~~ and !~~ infix operators
• various forms of binding to a variable or attribute
• “is rw” on Parameters
• BEGIN blocks
• RakuAST nodes for:
  • handling sigilless variable declarations
  • label declarations
  • bare code blocks in a regex
  • the ** regex quantifier
  • the ! infix prefix meta-op
  • the R infix prefix meta-op

Questions about Raku

• How to loop on sorted (with custom sort) keys of a hash? by user15795022.
• Running Raku on MacOS in a simple way by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Assigning defaults to attributes that are fixed length lists (and other confusions) by tomgracey.
• How about an “efficiency” section? by Georgii.
• Implementation of a function object power operator by Anton Antonov.
• Adding stuff such as average, median etc. by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Compiling/transpiling Perl to readable (not executable) Javascript (or Perl to Raku to Javascript) by bjohas.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• This just in! by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Powerful and loving it by Victor R.
• Welcome on the Raku channel on Telegram by Joaquín Ferrero 🇪🇸 💻 🐧 🦋 🐪 🗽.
• Going down to zero by Steve Scaffidi.
• Fixing OpenSSL on MacOS by Shoichi Kaji.
• Download your T-shirt by The Raku Conference.
• Akin to Yarning by Pete Bray.
• Idioms for timing code by əric.
• Made TOML faster by Tony O’Dell.
• Changed the most by Jonathan Eunice.
• Simple needs by Curtis Poe.
• #111.2 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Re: Comparing Int and Num by sisyphus.

Comments about Raku

• That’s a listop! by Ralph Mellor.
• Not sure what your aim is by Ralph Mellor.
• Other solutions to OpenSSL on MacOS by Vadim Belman.
• Rooting for Raku by Ralph Mellor.
• Just slow by Tony O’Dell.
• Introspecting compiler meta-data by Ralph Mellor.
• t’Is he! by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

Note: these do not include modules added / updated to the zef ecosystem yet. Need to find some tuits to automate fetching that information.

• antlia, caelum, orion by Andinus.
• IRC::Channel::Log by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• rakudoc by Tim Siegel.

Updated Raku Modules

• DB::SQLite by Curt Tilmes.
• HTML::Canvas::To::PDF, PDF, HarfBuzz, CSS::Grammar, CSS, PDF::Content by David Warring.
• IRC::Log::Colabti, Array::Sorted::Util, Array::Sparse by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Chart::Gnuplot by Itsuki Toyota.
• Tinky by Jonathan Stowe.
• Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::N, Gnome::Gio, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gdk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Trait::Env by Simon Proctor.
• fez by Tony O’Dell.

Winding down

Yet another week with cool releases. The Comma IDE becomes more amazing at every release. And a new Rakudo Star! And some nice new modules as well! And plenty of other stuff to read about in this week’s Rakudo Weekly News! Hope to see you all next week. Until then, stay healthy and stay safe!