After a lot of discussion, Andrew Shitov has announced the schedule of the first ever Raku Conference (online on 6, 7 and 8 August 2021). Yes, you read that right: 3 days! One track per day. There’s still room for additional Lightning Talks on Saturday, so you can still submit a Lightning Talk! Looks like it’s going to be an excellent event, also thanks to the Sponsors!

Episodic Participation Survey

Dr. Ann Barcomb has put out a survey to research the episodic (aka occasional) participation in the Raku community (announcement, take the survey, biography, publications). As a reader of the Rakudo Weekly News, please consider taking the survey!

Call for Grants

A Call for Grant Proposals is out again, for the 2021 July round this time!

Flavio’s Corner

Flavio Poletti continued writing, with 2 posts this week!

• Default member values… oh my! (/r/rakulang comments)
• Brute forcing a puzzle

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #122 is available for your perusal. And this week’s “What’s everyone working on (2021.29)” as well.

Pull Requests

• Opener chars doc unicode mismatch fix
• Fix another bug in MVM_str_hash_fsck()
• Wrap QAST::Regex from qbuildsub in QAST::Stmts…
• Build: Tidy and improve cleanup rules
• Create checksums for release files
• Fix List.reduce method failing with &[&&]

Please check these Pull Requests and leave any comments that you may have!

Core Developments

• Nicholas Clark fixed a number of bugs in the various hash_fsck functions on MoarVM.
• Ben Davies fixed an issue with sockets that time out while being opened.
• Stefan Seifert fixed a read overflow issue in the bytecode dumper and a reproducible build issue on NQP.
• Patrick Böker made the *w.exe binaries on Windows not open a console window, and fixed checking for writeability when installing modules on Windows.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen worked a lot on the standard iterators for some marginal improvements, and made next foo and last foo only available in the latest language version.

Meanwhile, on the new-disp branch, Jonathan Worthington managed to get 98% of spectest files to pass. Again, this is an immense step forward. Looks like a merge is getting closer and closer. But please remember that these tests now pass: there will still be significant effort needed to make a great number of optimizations work again. Still, looking quite good!

Questions about Raku

• Raku infix operator in method-like syntax by mykhal.
• Questions here? by misterperl
• Compilation error only when using the repl by rajashekar.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Representing malware genes by JJ Merelo.
• Cooler in Raku by Sean Kenji Gold.
• Renamed? by livana Lemmetyinen.
• Thoughts on grammars? by Tim is working on his website (2/100 features).
• A good solution by Gabriele Renzi.
• Introducing Tracer::Memory by Ben Davies.
• Lightning talk added by Andrew Shitov.
• Different tribes by Sean Kenji Gold.
• Didn’t work either by 𝔸𝕚𝕝𝕖𝕣𝕠𝕟(えるろん) @ Design technologist.
• Kind of bummed by Simon Proctor.
• A tough time by Sean Kenji Gold.
• Pretty cool book by Sean Kenji Gold.
• Started experimenting by Ben Sobel.
• Implementable in Raku by Sean Kenji Gold.
• Ordered a slew by Sean Kenji Gold.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• REPL / Linenoise question (backslashes) by William Michels.
• [naive] hash assingment by Aureliano Guedes.
• XML module question? by William Michels.
• Searching for a blog by Marcel Timmerman.
• Why does .new initialize? by Peter Scott.
• pod questions by Marcel Timmerman.

Comments about Raku

• Making classes final by Ralph Mellor.
• An amazing job by Daniel Sockwell.
• On Representation Polymorphism by Ralph Mellor.
• The perfect language by Daniel Sockwell.
• Arbitrary precision rationals by Ralph Mellor.
• This or that? by useerup.
• A mature operators set! by useerup.
• More for binary operations by Vadim Belman.
• On operator overloading by Ralph Mellor.
• Interesting every week by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• A treatise on multiple ways? by Ralph Mellor.
• Pretty clear by now by 1ter.
• Missed something? by Stephen Stuckwisch.
• Not a thing anymore by dale_glass.
• Idea unification by Ralph Mellor.
• Still has a link! by 1nickt.

New Raku Modules

• Qt::QtWidgets A wrapper to the Qt Widgets GUI by Yves Guillemot.
• Hash::Ordered role for ordered Hashes by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Raku Modules

• Hematite by André Brás.
• LibraryMake, Net::SMTP by Andrew Egeler.
• p6doc by JJ Merelo.
• Text::CodeProcessing by Anton Antonov.
• Trait::Traced by Ben Davies.
• LibXML, PDF::Content, PDF::Font::Loader by David Warring.
• Hash::Agnostic, Map::Agnostic, Map::Ordered by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gio by Marcel Timmerman.
• zef by Nick Logan, Tony O’Dell.
• Config::BINDish, Test::Async by Vadim Belman.
• OpenSSL by Nick Logan.
• Physics::Measure by Steve Roe.

Winding down

A cool three-day conference, some blog posts, some interesting new modules, a scientific survey and the new-disp branch getting to 98% of tests passing! An exciting week, yet again. Meanwhile, stay healthy and stay vigilant. The freedom to get infected may be a goal in some countries, it is definitely not a right you should wish to exercise!