So you’re a frequent visitor of this popular bar. Then one day, the management of the bar changes and most of the personnel decides to start working for another bar. Management of the bar then shuts out any remaining guests because the remaining guests where just talking about the new bar. Followed by the new management changing the locks on the doors so nobody can get in anymore.

This in short is what happened in the Freenode to Libera.chat saga (/r/rakulang, SlashDot comments, TheRegister article). Since most of the move was already done before the new management of Freenode decided to make themselves impossible, this did not affect the Raku community much. But, as Patrick Spek writes on the mailing list, there are still a lot of references to Freenode in ecosystem module documentation, that would need to be updated. Please help module authors by providing a Pull Request for such an update, when you find such a reference!

Veering off on a Raku regex tangent

Brian Wisti continues to blog about their journey into the Raku Programming Language with Joplin CLI Batch Processing with Raku (/r/rakulang comments).

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #115 is available for your perusal. And this week’s “What’s everyone working on (2021.22)” as well.

Pull Requests

• Document Str.samecase
• Fix ShiftJIS decoder bug: \r + error + replacement
• Simplify pre-processor code
• Tweak worker addition for many small tasks
• Make .grep(Regex) and .first(Regex) about 40% faster

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

Core Developments

• Nicholas Clark made multi-thread access to a hash less likely to segfault (but throw an exception in a more friendly way).
• Jan-Olof Hendig fixed a race condition with dynamic variable lookup in worker threads.
• Tom Browder documented some confusing differences between gcc and clang.
• Daniel Green partially implemented translate_newlines configuration on the JVM backend.
• Christian Bartolomäus fixed a long standing issue with native arrays in pre-compiled modules on the JVM backend.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added a repl subroutine for entering a REPL at any point in your program, and added .Buf / .Blob coercers for .Blob and .Buf.

Meanwhile, on the RakuAST branch, Jonathan Worthington has been busy again, by adding nodes for <&foo> style assertions, <{$some-regex-code}> and /<$rx-code-to-interpolate>/, and fixing some issues with backtracking.

Questions about Raku

• Raku equivalent to JavaScript’s setTimeout(fn, 0)? by Daniel Sockwell.
• Why is Raku brought up so much in the context of programming language design, but not much in other contexts by -Mobius-Strip-Tease.
• REPL appears unresponsive on cygwin under Windows 8 by user2925716.
• Library was not found by user2925716.
• A graphical interface for WIndows 8 by user2925716.
• How can I return 2 hashes from a sub? by GRM.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• A minor update by Brian Wisti.
• Registered! by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Whatever they call it by Tyson Key.
• Grammar example by Brad Gilbert.
• Could have been by Stephen Ferraro.
• Reborn by Steven Hilton.
• Accepting ≠ as well by Diego Elio Pettenò.
• Destructuring arguments by Khalid Elboray.
• Show and tell by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Nuking by mention by Curtis Poe.
• Compiling on a Pi 4 by Jonathan Stowe.
• Check out junctions! by Martin Janiczek.
• Sad by Joelle Maslak.
• Obsolete or… by Stephen Neuhaus.
• Already in rakulang by JJ Merelo.
• Where I stop by JJ Merelo.
• Serial port library by Jonathan Stowe.
• MySQL driver for Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Sclamberr by Julia.
• Fun in a way others are not by Julia.
• 10K+ contributions by Mohammad S Anwar.
• #115.2 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• How to form rules for commutative triads? by rir.
• What’s going on with given (junction) {when (value)...} by yary.
• Migration from Freenode to Libera by Patrick Spek.

Comments about Raku

• Horses for courses by Ralph Mellor.
• On the IntelliJ Platform by JetBrains.
• Don’t repeat yourself by Ralph Mellor.
• Some of my code by Smylers.
• Not a kludge by Ralph Mellor.
• Not amused by H. Merijn Brand.
• Mostly regular by Ralph Mellor.
• TAL syntax by webmaven.
• Every possible paradigm by systems.
• Diverged significantly by unquietwiki.
• A similar narrative by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

Thanks to Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer for again making this a lot easier for yours truly.

• App::IRC::Log, IRC::Log::Textual by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Net::Ethereum by Konstantin Narkhov .
• Lingua::EN::Numbers by Steve Schulze.
• Sustenance by Andy Weidenbaum.

Updated Raku Modules

• XML by Jonathan Stowe.
• p6doc by JJ Merelo.
• antlia by Andinus.
• Curlie by Brian Duggan.
• LibXML, W3C::DOM by David Warring.
• IRC::Channel::Log, IRC::Log, IRC::Log::Colabti by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Net::BGP by Joelle Maslak.
• Gnome::Gdk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.
• JSON::Fast by Timo Paulssen.
• Config::BINDish by Vadim Belman.
• Date::Names by Tom Browder.
• Term::Choose, Term::Choose::Util by Matthäus Kiem.

Winding down

Wow, what a week of weird developments affecting the Raku Programming Language. Fortunately we were prepared. And cool to see updates of modules that are so upstream in the ecosystem. Hope to see you all next week again! And please, stay in good health!