Patrick Spek reports on behalf of the Raku Steering Council about the move of all Raku-related IRC channels from Freenode to Libera.chat, after most of the Freenode volunteers have left after what has been considered a hostile takeover. So if you want to chat with Rakoons, use the irc.libera.chat IRC servers from now on! The following channels have now effectively moved: #raku, #raku-dev, #moarvm, #cro, #mugs, #red and #raku-gamedev. And there is now also #raku-steering-council channel for direct communication with the Raku Steering Council.

Journaling in Joplin

Brian Wisti has blogged about their use of the Raku Programming Language, in combination with Joplin, an open source note taking and to-do application:

• CLI Journaling in Joplin with Raku
• My Raku script for Journaling in Joplin

Conference Update

Andrew Shitov provided an update on the online Raku Conference to be held on 7 August 2021: already more than 50 registrations!. Please don’t forget to register if you plan to attend (/r/rakulang comments). In any case, your T-shirt is virtually ready!

Rakudo Compiler Release

Alexander Kiryuhin announced the Rakudo 2021.05 Compiler release. A small release, with mostly stability fixes and performance fixes on the VM side, as well as cross-platforming fixes. Packages and binary releases to become available soon.

Grants Update

Jonathan Worthington not only has been busy developing, they have also been busy reporting:

• April RakuAST Grant Report
• April Report of the Raku Development Grant

Since the latter grant is about to run out, Jonathan also submitted a Grant Request for Raku Dispatch and Compiler Improvements. Please leave comments you may have with the Grant Request!

Also in related news, the Grants Committee has an opening: so if you would like to have a say about the allocation of grants, this is your chance (/r/rakulang comments)!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #114 is available for your perusal. And this week’s “What’s everyone working on (2021.21)” as well.

Pull Requests

• Quell compiler warnings on Linux with gcc
• Partially implement translate_newlines config in DecoderInstance
• Provide a method returning a real posix value
• Make DateTime.posix return a fractional value in 6.e
• Make 6.e PseudoStash a child of 6.c PseudoStash
• Add .Buf / .Blob coercers to Blob / Buf

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

Core Developments

• Nicholas Clark reorganised some MoarVM internals that should allow C-compilers to better optimize MoarVM.
• Daniel Green made CI jobs be more verbose should a segfault occur during testing, and fixed getting a file’s modification time on the JVM backend when running on Windows.
• After many weeks of chasing a very hard to reproduce segfault on highly threaded code, Stefan Seifert found it to be a combination of C-compilers re-ordering code, causing reads to be done before a write had occurred. Once that was discovered, the fix was easy: tell the compiler not to do that!
• Tom Browder fixed some compiler warnings on GNU builds.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed an issue with shaped array copying, with substr-rw on an allomorph, and made DateTime.posix about 12x as fast.
• Moon-chilled added support for ∊ and ∍ as aliases for ∈ and ∋ (yes, apparently Unicode has small versions for ∈ and ∋).
• And some smaller fixes.

Meanwhile, on the RakuAST branch, Jonathan Worthington has been busy the past two weeks implementing RakuAST nodes for:

• Regex backslash sequences \e, \f, \h, \r, \t, \v, \0, \o, \x, \c.
• /<+alpha>/ and /<-alpha>/ in regexes.
• Unicode property matches in regexes, such as /<:L>/.
• Regex internal modifiers
• Character classes in regexes
• Regex variable interpolation

All exciting stuff!

Questions about Raku

• Is it possible to chain metaoperators to calculate the product-sum of two lists? by Zaid.
• CONTROL phasers from a trait by Daniel Sockwell.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Exciting to attend by Mark Gardner.
• RakuAST grant report by Moritz Lenz.
• #113.2 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• Ungolfed version by Markus Holzer.
• Looking for a new language and a nice community by D Ruth Holloway.
• A great tool to handle this safely by [𝚘𝚋𝚓𝚎𝚌𝚝 𝙾𝚋𝚓𝚎𝚌𝚝].
• Geo3x3 implementation by 福野泰介.
• Not encouraging dangerous techniques by Steven Huwig.
• Enjoy reading one-liners by Brian Wisti.
• The real gem by Markus Holzer.
• Not so bad at all by Ali.
• Not spreading by Social Justice Cleric.
• New talks submitted by The Raku Conference.
• Against boredom by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Not a camel by キャサリン.
• Too bad it didn’t catch by devfrustrado.
• No longer? by キャサリン.
• Failed to deliver by 🇨🇦WhatsMyPot🌲🌱🌿.
• A lot of justification by Brian Wisti.
• No messing with getopt by Brian Wisti.
• Looks really nice by Newres Al Haider.
• Not so close by Liam Proven.
• Wondering what it was by conf@UEC.
• Running Raku in Latex by 黒木玄 Gen Kuroki.
• Checking for anagrams by Suman Khanal.
• 114.2 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• File::Find using a junction with exclude by Joseph Brenner.
• In regexes with :P5 compatibility turned-on, do embedded modifierswork? by Joseph Brenner.

Comments about Raku

• Boring and important and sexy and a huge problem by Ralph Mellor.
• A great asset by Steve Roe.
• Phrase based by notagoodidea.
• Out of the box for numbers by Ralph Mellor.
• Making a Raku solution? by dkechag.

New Raku Modules

Note: these also include new and updated modules from the zef ecosystem of the past 4 weeks. Thanks to Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer for making that a lot easier for yours truly. Also note that the links now point to a new ecosystem site raku.land by James Raspass.

• CBOR::Simple, TinyFloats, Cro::CBOR by Geoffrey Broadwell.
• Config::BINDish by Vadim Belman.
• IRC::Log by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Archive::Tar::PP by Tony O’Dell.

Updated Raku Modules

• Test::Async by Vadim Belman.
• TOML, fez by Tony O’Dell.
• MUGS, MUGS::UI::WebSimple, MUGS::UI::TUI, MUGS::UI::CLI, MUGS::Games, MUGS::Core by Geoffrey Broadwell.
• Term::Choose by Matthäus Kiem.
• IRC::Channel::Log, IRC::Log::Colabti by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• CSS::Stylesheet, CSS, CSS::TagSet by David Warring.
• Cro::OpenAPI::RoutesFromDefinition by Jonathan Worthington.
• Hematite by André Brás.
• DateTime::Posix by Tom Browder.
• Subsets::Common, Net::IP::Parse by Brad Clawsie.
• License::SPDX by Jonathan Stowe.
• Gnome::GObject by Marcel Timmerman.
• p6doc by Raku Community.
• Algorithm::LibSVM by Itsuki Toyota.

Winding down

A lot of stuff happening affecting the Raku Community in the past week. Fortunately, the moving of the IRC channels has almost been completed already: there’s just the matter of how to deal with the transition period. It was good to catch up on a lot of things in this week’s Rakudo Weekly News. See you next week! All in good health!