The Rakudo Core Developer team (more specifically Jonathan Worthington, Stefan Seifert, Daniel Green, Jan-Olof Hendig, Nicholas Clark and Oleksandr Kyriukhin) have reached a milestone on the new-disp branch: all 117K+ spectests are now passing! Focus for the coming week is now on fixing module breakage in the ecosystem (some of which is caused by them being naughty referring to internal features that have been refactored), and improving the performance of Rakudo. Great to see such advances!

Foundation Developments

Daniel Sockwell, member of the Raku Steering Council, has been accepted as a board member of Yet Another Society, known to most of you as “The Perl Foundation”. In a blog post, they explain the situation around the “Raku Foundation”, dba’s (aka Doing Business As) and the developments around the Raku Trademark (/r/rakulang, Twitter comments).

The Raku Solution

Conor Hoekstra has made a follow-up video about the solution of a single problem in 16 different programming languages in 1 Problem, 5 Programming Languages. The Raku Programming Language is again one of them.

Miniconf

On the mini-conference on 18 November 2021, organised by Thibault Duponchelle, it appears that JJ Merelo and JJ Atria will be giving presentations.

Flavio’s Corner

Flavio Poletti continued their quest into Raku land with two blog posts about features of the Raku Programming Language this week:

• Advent of Code 2018/04 made me feel old
• Pronunciation defects (/r/rakulang comments)

Wenzel’s Corner

Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer was triggered by the use of placeholder variables in roast: Calling by name (/r/rakulang comments).

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #129 is available for your perusal.

Pull Requests

• Fix escaping of # in regexes
• Disallow creating Uni with out-of-range codepoints
• Remove mention of the Perl community

Core Developments

• Elizabeth Mattijsen micro-optimized Promise.new, and made sprintf always show the format being used when an error occurs in sprintf formatting.
• Daniel Sockwell tuned the CannotPrecomp exception.
• Ben Davies optimized the use of the internal concretization table.

Questions about Raku

• Raku array will not sort by con.
• Lookaround regex and character consumption by Daniel Sockwell.
• Raku zip operator & space by Jan Bodnar.
• Separating operator definitions for a class to other files and using them by Hanselmann.
• Should sigilless “variables” with Numeric type constraints be re-bindable? by Daniel Sockwell.
• Return Type by use3166747.
• How can Raku mixins work with operator overloading? by Steve Roe.
• Promise needs a .then-map? by Jonathan Stowe.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• 100K pageviews in 6 months by Mark Gardner.
• #128.2 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• Reading and learning by Alvaro Tejado Galindo.
• An RPM to play with by Jonathan Stowe.
• Learning a nascent protest language by KMFT ⬡.
• That’s why we tag #rakulang by Brian Wisti.

Comments about Raku

• Better have a single dependency by Steve Roe/.
• Woot! by bobthecimmerian.
• An excellent introduction from the IntelliJ Platform Plugin SDK.
• Interesting discussion by Flavio Poletti.
• What’s new about it? by tekknolagi.

Updated Raku Modules

• Algorithm::SpiralMatrix by Michal Jurosz.
• URI, CSS::Properties by David Warring.
• App::IRC::Log by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Text::CSV by H.Merijn Brand.
• JSON::Marshal by Jonathan Stowe.
• LZW::Revolunet by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Data::Dump by Tony O’Dell.

Winding down

The new-disp branch is now stable enough for yours truly to develop on. If you have a rakudo checkout, run git pull; perl Configure.pl --force-rebuild --gen-moar=new-disp --gen-nqp=new-disp --make-install) and you should be set also. Exciting times! But please also stay vigilant, stay safe, stay healthy. Next week will bring you another dose of news about the Raku Programming Language to keep you occupied!