Only a few days to go until the first Raku Conference (on 6, 7 and 8 August), online this time because of the pandemic. With attendees from more than 30 countries, 3 workshops sessions, 13 presentations, and a nice selection of Lightning Talks (schedule). Brought to you by Andrew Shitov and associates, and sponsored by Edument and Perl Services. It’s not too late to register yet! And if you’re registered, don’t forget to have your Conference T-Shirt made for the complete experience!

Meanwhile, Andrew Shitov is looking ahead, hoping to organize an in-person Raku conference in Rīga in 2022. It would be nice to be able to visit Rīga again, 3 years later.

Alexey’s Corner

Alexey Melezhik published only one blog post this week: Data Structures and Algorithms with Raku and Sparrow , update #2.

Flavio’s Corner

Flavio Poletti continued writing, with two blog posts this week:

• Raku community answered to shift || 5 (/r/rakulang comments).
• Double check a puzzle result (/r/rakulang comments).

Wenzel’s Corner

Wenzel couldn’t resist Flavio’s blog post, and came with one of their own: Only infinite elements.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #124 is available for your perusal. And this week’s “What’s everyone working on (2021.31)” as well.

Pull Requests

• Introduce curried role binding
• Enhance signature-signature typechecking
• Make .sort aware of any &[cmp] additions

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

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert fixed an issue with spesh optimizing away a loop label when it shouldn’t, and fixed a potential deadlock when MoarVM is about to garbage collect.
• Daniel Green added JIT templates for fetching and binding of attributes.
• Vadim Belman fixed a race condition in ClassHOW.new_type.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made NativeCall‘s Pointer class return 0 when numifying the type, and fixed the error reporting on the deprecation message of Proc.status.

This week’s development action was mainly on the new-disp branch, with only 5 files left with spectest failures, aka 99.6% passing! Jonathan Worthington mostly focussed on making spesh, inlining and JITting work correctly. So working on making it fast, rather than just correctly! Again, Stefan Seifert, Jan Olof Hendig, Daniel Green and Timo Paulssen have been able to support Jonathan with fixes on the new-disp branch, after investigating several reports of code analysis and performance tools showing problems. It quite hasn’t been that busy on the #moarvm IRC channel in many years!

Questions about Raku

• Unexpected Non-Laziness by Holli.
• Install Rakudo on termux/android by Saya Gans.
• Any tips to improve the performance of spectral-norm in benchmarksgames by maxc01 (/r/rakulang comments).
• When are phaser traits run? by JJ Merelo.
• Adding phasers to Block variables by JJ Merelo.
• Do will traits only apply to objects? by JJ Merelo.
• Raku variable re-assign method result if not Nil by mykhal.
• Raku-native disk space usage by uxer.
• Find programmatically all the classes, grammars, and roles in a Raku package by Anton Antonov.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• #123.2 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• #123.1 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• Appears incompatible by mt_chan.
• Can’t register by Маша.
• Not heard anything by kubo39.d.
• Faster version by Markus Holzer.
• Revived by し ぐ ま .
• Maybe they’ve been waiting by Wiggly.
• Installing Rakudo on termux by 04xhinat.
• Just replace the syntax and the interpreter by shckor.
• Kind of difficult by りお.
• Felt pretty good by 2gua.
• Is it a standard feature? by し ぐ ま .
• It’s gone by ChaosReadman.
• All about dropping print by Triss.
• Sometime at Christmas by 伴太.
• No pay off for me by Wiggly.
• Amusing at least by Sean Kenji Gold.
• Was it? by Marcin Krzyzanows.
• Advanced lexer by Julia.
• Submit your lightning talk! by Andrew Shitov.
• Hallelujah! by Sean Kenji Gold.
• This Friday! by Andrew Shitov.
• Coming flow by Shinya Kato.
• #124.1 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• Solved Euler #22! by Julia.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Rakudo-Star for Windows: 2021.07 MSI package by notna.
• Depreciated code???? by ToddAndMargo.

Comments about Raku

• TIL: Raku’s any junction can make multiple hash keys point to one value by Daniel Sockwell.
• Example of VM by committee by simcop2387.
• Static call graph generation by koknat.
• Taking forever to implement by benibela.

New Raku Modules

• lacerta Lacerta parses WhatsApp exported logs by Andinus.

Updated Raku Modules

• BSON::Simple by Geoffrey Broadwell.
• Net::Ethereum by Konstantin Narkhov.
• PDF, PDF::Font::Loader by David Warring.
• TOML::Thumb by James Raspass.
• JSON::Class, JSON::Marshal by Jonathan Stowe.
• ABC by Solomon Foster.
• Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.
• Proc::More by Tom Browder.
• Term::TablePrint by Matthäus Kiem.

Winding down

Things were definitely firing on all cylinders this week on the #moarvm channel. Can’t wait to see Jonathan‘s presentation about this work at the Raku Conference. As always, remain careful and vigilant: this pandemic is far from over yet! See you all next week!