Alexander Kiryuhin, Jonathan Worthington and vendethiel released Cro 0.8.5, the library for building reactive distributed systems taking advantage of all that the Raku Programming Language has to offer. Most important new features are the use of TCP_NODELAY by default (which improves network performance) and on-demand reloading of templates in development environments.

This release comes about 6 months since the previous release and has kindly been supported by Edument. The next release is planned for July 2021 (roadmap).

A new IRC::Client

Patrick Spek has been working on a new version of IRC::Client, a popular module for doing stuff with IRC, such as creating IRC bots. It’s almost compatible with the old version, but with some notable differences. This week they’ve blogged about it and how this will potentially affect users of IRC::Client (/r/rakulang comments). Please let your thoughts be known!

Call for Grant Proposals

Although one can commit a Grant Proposal for a Raku project any time of the year, it is good to sometimes be reminded that another round is coming up to a deadline. So it’s not too late to submit your proposal for the May Round of the Foundation Grants.

Conference Season

Sadly, it is not possible to have in-person conferences yet, so there’s the 2021 Conference in the Cloud instead (8-10 June 2021, schedule, FaceBook). The following presentations are planned that are about the Raku Programming Language, or that touch aspects of it:

• Raku, the Big by Bruce Gray.
• Raku syntax I miss in other languages by Leon Timmermans.
• Yes, we have that too: Functional programming in Raku by JJ Merelo.
• The irregularity of regular expressions by Jordan Adler.
• Making Life Better with Software by Joelle Maslak.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #113 is available for your perusal. And this week’s “What’s everyone working on (2021.20)” as well.

Pull Requests

• Try to trap concurrent hash accesses
• [JVM] Keep correct REPR.name for native arrays

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

Core Developments

Clearly a very quiet week, with most of the core developers working on non-core Raku projects.

• Nicholas Clark fixed some valgrind warnings when HASH_DEBUG_ITER was defined, implemented MVM_num_isnanorinf using isinf and isnan.
• Stefan Seifert fixed an issue with the optimization of smart_intify.
• Daniel Green fixed some issues on the Continuous Integration pipelines.
• Stoned Elipot tweaked some texts.

Questions about Raku

• is pure trait and default parameters by Daniel Sockwell.
• How can I filter out consecutive repeats in a sequence? by Zaid.
• Why are installed modules deep in a directory structure? by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Is there a way to use only precompiled modules by Demayl.
• Is it possible to distribute the code of a class to several files? by sid_com.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Community recommended modules by Joelle Maslak.
• Please take over all-modules maintenance by Moritz Lenz.
• Should be possible to do by Julia.
• Will it take off? by Ian.
• Did not stop working by Jonathan Stowe.
• Once it is stable by Phil Urich.
• Always had plans by Sebastian Riedel.
• There was an O’Reilly Book by Ryuichi@k8s再入門中.
• Ruining a joke by Not Fake Adam Kalsey.
• No longer in its way by Jakub Oboza.
• Concurrently, oh my! by JJ Merelo.
• New approach is an alternative by Jean-Noël Rouvignac.
• What my fingers want by Paul Cochrane.
• Women maintainers? by Nithya Ruff.
• New kid on IRC::Client by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Involving people from far away by The Raku Conference.
• Mandelbrot source by Solomon Foster.
• It finally happened by JJ Merelo.
• No migration issues by Don Christie.
• Doing Raku in a microwave by AdamCeramic.
• Purely made by Raku Enthusiast.
• #113 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.

Comments about Raku

• Closed / Open endpoints syntax by Ralph Mellor.
• On Instruction Selection by Ralph Mellor.
• As orthogonal as possible by Steve Roe.
• Don’t dislike pod6 by Ralph Mellor.
• Programmer virtues by Brent Laabs.
• Like a parody, what I mean by Ralph Mellor.
• What you are telling it by Brad Gilbert.
• Again the same as Rust by Ralph Mellor.
• More modern than anything else by GuB-42.
• Going to stay Perl by Neil Bowers.
• Took a while to get back! by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

Note: these still do not include modules added / updated to the zef ecosystem yet. Need to find some tuits to automate fetching that information or someone else to fix this before yours truly has time for it (nudge nudge).

• Cro::APIToken, Cro::APIToken::Store::Pg by Alexander Kiryuhin & Jonathan Worthington .
• Template::Nest by Tom Gracey.

Updated Raku Modules

• Hematite by André Brás.
• Curlie, Terminal::UI by Brian Duggan.
• HTML::Canvas, CSS, CSS::Stylesheet, CSS::Selector::To::XPath, CSS::Properties by David Warring.
• IRC::Channel::Log, String::Color by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Audio::PortAudio by Jonathan Stowe.
• Cro::HTTP, Cro::Core, Cro::WebApp, Cro::WebSocket, Cro::TLS, Cro::HTTP::Test, cro by Alexander Kiryuhin, Jonathan Worthington, vendethiel.
• Gnome::GObject by Marcel Timmerman.
• Abbreviations by Tom Browder.
• Term::Choose by Matthäus Kiem.

Winding down

A lot of stuff happening in the background again. Such as the Raku IRC Log project, that has a alpha-version running, which has taken most of yours truly development time the past week. Otherwise, plenty of stuff to read again about in this week’s Rakudo Weekly News! And to repeat once again: stay healthy and stay safe! See you next week!