Leon Timmermans made a really nice presentation on Raku syntax that they miss in other programming languages. In doing so, they introduce a lot of Raku concepts and syntax from standard programming idioms. Recommended if you don’t know Raku very well, but are a more or less experienced programmer!

The Conference in the Cloud of course had many other cool presentations that touched on the Raku Programming Language:

• Raku, the Big by Bruce Gray.
• Discoverability and Composability: Writing an ECS for Fun and Profit by JJ Atria.
• 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.
• Unite the Ethereum Networks by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Asynchonously Parallellish Testing in Raku by Vadim Belman.
• Cryptographically agile password hashing with Crypt::Passphrase by Leon Timmermans.
• Épée – A work in progress Framework for Raku by Daniel Sockwell.

DevRoom on esLibre

In related news, the program for the Raku DevRoom at Congreso esLibre (the Spanish equivalent of FOSDEM) on 26 June 2021 has been published. With presentations by Joelle Maslak, Paula de la Hoz, Clifton Wood, Cecilia Merelo and yours truly.

Can Raku replace HTML?

With this clickbaity title, Steve Roe has written another blog post about expanding existing Raku idioms to make creation of HTML applications easier (/r/rakulang comments).

Teaching on a waterbed

Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer was inspired by Bruce Gray‘s Raku, the Big presentation to write a blog post about improving the Raku documentation (/r/rakulang comments).

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #117 is available for your perusal. And this week’s “What’s everyone working on (2021.24)” as well.

Pull Requests

• Add Real.{Int,Num,Rat} coercers ref #3782
• Restore Pod6 E<> html entity support
• Fix make test on M1 hardware (fix for #4394)

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

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert made deserialization of pre-compiled modules a lot faster, and made setting up subs with the is native trait about 2x as fast (which both should be very noticeable with large numbers of modules / subs involved).
• Daniel Green optimized some NQP internals that were added to produce reproducible builds and error reporting.
• Christian Bartolomäus simplified many internals now the use of native arrays does not have to be special-cased for the JVM backend anymore.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made Mu eqv Mu work (instead of throwing an exception).
• Stéphane Payrard fixed a reference to testing.

Questions about Raku

• Best Way to Resolve Circular Module Loading by JustThisGuy.
• Why do I get “Lexical with name $x does not exist in this frame” when using will leave? by Nikola Benes.
• Performance benchmark between Raku and Python by sumanstats.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Which is faster? by かにみ楚歌.
• ECS just for fun by JJ Atria.
• Best to learn by Paul Cochrane.
• Explained from standard idioms by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Working in kindergarten by Xavier Noria.
• So much more by Marc Chantreux.
• Don’t miss it! by JJ Merelo.
• The first time by JJ Merelo.
• Check out my lightning talk by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Some call to drop by Mark Gardner.
• One of the two by JJ Merelo.
• The day will come… by qooqle.
• Difficult to teach by Dr. Roy Schestowitz (罗伊).
• Learn raku by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Two sides by Mark Gardner.
• Wish I was writing… by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Jellies and kids by Kang-min Liu.
• Relearn by D.Aoki (Amamori).
• #117.1 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Buf to Str by Paul Procacci.
• Notes/Questions about Leon Timmermans’s talk by Marc Chantreux.

Comments about Raku

• Now just port it by zengargoyle.
• One of the DSL’s by Ralph Mellor.
• Want a demo? by bmn__.
• Certainly interesting by Aldebaran.
• Error message approach by brudgers.
• Using Raku from the command line by jubilatious1.
• Can be used for any infix operation by Ralph Mellor.
• Written as a reduce? by Altreus.

New Raku Modules

• Spreadsheet::Libxlsxio by Fernando Santagata.
• Crypt::Passphrase by Leon Timmermans.

Updated Raku Modules

• Documentable, p6doc, Pod::To::HTML by JJ Merelo.
• YAMLish by Leon Timmermans.
• Spreadsheet::XLSX by Jonathan Worthington.
• LibXML by David Warring.
• FHIR by Hugh Simpson.
• App::IRC::Log, IRC::Channel::Log, IRC::Log, IRC::Log::Colabti, IRC::Log::Textual by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Pod::Test::Code by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• CBOR::Simple, Cro::CBOR by Geoffrey Broadwell.
• Gnome::Gdk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• DateTime::Julian, Math::Trig by Tom Browder.
• Config::BINDish by Vadim Belman.
• Term::TablePrint by Matthäus Kiem.
• RakuRename by Stuart Little.

Winding down

In a week with many distractions (conference, big sporting events), nice weather (at least in Europe) and a release approaching, it’s good to be able to tell this much about the Raku Programming Language in this issue of the Rakudo Weekly News. As always, stay in good health and hope to see you again next week!