The first Raku Conference is over: if you like the full experience, you can check out the video streams of Day 1, Day 2, Day 3. It was great to see such an event dedicated to the Raku Programming Language run so smoothly, thanks to Andrew Shitov, all the presenters and participants, as well as the sponsors!

Each of the presentations will have their own video, accessible from the talk pages. They are:

• 105 C++ Algorithms in 1 line* of Raku (*each) by Daniel Sockwell.
• Learning Raku From Inside Out by Vadim Belman.
• Sigils. Once you know them, you’ll love them in the Raku Programming Language by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Parallelized And Concurrent Testing With Test::Async by Vadim Belman.
• Traipsing through Raku land by José Joaquín Atria.
• A Raku API to Raku programs: the journey so far by Jonathan Worthington.
• Update on Raku Persistent Data Structures by Daniel Sockwell.
• Fez/Zef, an Ecosystem and the Architecture by Tony O’Dell.
• A new general dispatch mechanism to speed up various slow Raku constructs by Jonathan Worthington.
• Finally Christmas by Fritz Zaucker (lightning talk).
• 5 minutes introduction into Sparrow by Alexey Melezhik (lightning talk).
• 5 minutes introduction into Bird by Alexey Melezhik (lightning talk).
• Reading files can’t be this simple by Bruce Gray (lightning talk).
• Getting Started with Raku Regexes by William Michels (lightning talk).
• Conferencing 2022 by Andrew Shitov (lightning talk).
• Making of Raku Developer by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Basics of templating with Cro::WebApp by Oleksandr Kyriukhin.
• Raku for Prediction by Anton Antonov.
• Raku and aspect oriented programming by JJ Merelo.
• Multi-network Ethereum dApp in Raku by Konstantin Narkhov.
• The Weekly Pearls of Raku by Andrew Shitov.

If the videos don’t show up on a page yet, please try again in a day or so: Andrew is working on encoding the presentations properly bookended as this is written.

Be sure to also check out the Comma promotional videos, each highlighting an aspect of the Comma IDE that will make you consider Comma for your Raku projects in the future (if you’re not using Comma already, of course).

On NFG and its potential issues

excors looked into how the Raku Programming Language compared to Swift with regards to Unicode and NFG specifically, and blogged about it. With quite an interesting set of comments to go with it on LWN.net, as well as on /r/rakulang.

TPF ╳ Raku

After the Raku Conference was over, Andrew Shitov expressed their view about the support they got from YAS (Yet Another Society, the official name of The Perl Foundation).  This caused some extensive commenting, also by yours truly.  It is to be hoped that something good will come from this in the future!

Alexey’s Corner

Alexey Melezhik was very busy again this week, both in creating new uses of Raku and blogging about it:

• Bird – servers verification tool written on Raku
• Jinga templates with Sparrow and Raku

Flavio’s Corner

Flavio Poletti continued their journey through Raku with four blog posts this week:

• Think Bayes in Raku – Pmf class
• Think Bayes in Raku – Suite class
• Idiomatic corrections
• More (welcome although embarrassing) feedback (/r/rakulang comments)

Wenzel’s Corner

Wenzel couldn’t resist a blog post by Flavio again, and came with one of their own again: They returned an empty package.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #125 is available for your perusal. And this week’s “What’s everyone working on (2021.32)” as well.

Core Developments

• Vadim Belman fixed type matching against several native types.
• Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer fixed reducing on the infix &&, ||, // and ^^ operators.
• Ben Davies enhanced signature-signature type checking and improved its performance.
• Itsuki Toyota made sure that NaN can be passed to subroutines with the is native trait.

Again, this week’s development action was mainly on the new-disp branch, although this slowed down a lot on account of talk presentations for the first Raku Conference.

Questions about Raku

• Is there something like functools.lru_cache in Raku? by Julia.
• How to specify a returned Array type? by sid_com.
• What is Raku mainly used for? by chickenstuff18.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• #124.2 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• 1.2 times by magnoliak.
• Representing algebraic data types by Felix.
• Getting to make it better by Jonathan Stowe.
• Opened a MoarVM issue by Julia.
• Thinking about adding CI by Julia.
• Like atomics? by Arne Mertz.
• First Fibonacci with 1000 digits by Julia.
• Is amazing by mempko.
• Bouncing in and out by Brian Wisti.
• Day one is over! by Andrew Shitov.
• Day two is over! by Andrew Shitov.
• Are you free in the afternoon? by Mohammad S Anwar.
• I will give the talk by Konstantin Narkhov.
• TIL about is copy by Julia.
• Back to base camp by JJ Merelo.
• Day three is over! by Andrew Shitov.
• The next version! by R.L. Dane.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Segmentation Fault by Joseph Polanik.

Comments about Raku

• Why am I giving up on Perl? by Sébastien Feugère.
• No correct answer by rmah.
• It all depends by Ralph Mellor.
• An easier version by Ralph Mellor.
• On returning a future or not by Ralph Mellor.
• Null object (RosettaCode).
• On transforming variadic type params by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Proc::Easy Provides an easier interface to the Proc class and the run routine by Tom Browder.
• bird Alternative to Chef Inspec by Alexey Melezhik.

Updated Raku Modules

• Hematite, Hematite::Middleware::Session by André Brás.
• Log::Async by Brian Duggan.
• CSS, CSS::Properties, CSS::Stylesheet, CSS::TagSet, PDF::Class, PDF::Font::Loader by David Warring.
• App::IRC::Log, Slang::Subscripts, silently by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Algorithm::XGBoost by Itsuki Toyota.
• EventSource::Server, License::SPDX by Jonathan Stowe.
• Cro::Core, Cro::HTTP, Cro::TLS, Cro::WebApp, Cro::WebSocket, cro by Jonathan Worthington.
• TAP by Leon Timmermans.
• Gnome::GObject, Gnome::N by Marcel Timmerman.
• Qt::QtWidgets by Yves Guillemot.
• fez by Tony O’Dell.

Winding down

It was a quiet week, with many people working on their Raku Conference presentations, or just being on holiday, or both. Until the extended weekend of course, when the Raku Conference hit! It was great to be at a conference again, albeit an online one. Looking forward to next year’s conference, hopefully IRL again. Still, please remain careful and vigilant: this pandemic is far from over yet! See you all next week!