Daniel Sockwell had a very busy week, asking all sorts of questions (1) (2), looking to improve the documentation on list assignments and soliciting feedback about that. And Daniel also published a blog post about the concept of labelling your code, in which they posit that “Comments are prose; labels are identifiers” (which resulted in quite a discussion on /r/rakulang). Thought provoking stuff!

2021.09 Release

Oleksandr Kyriukhin has done it again, this time while being on vacation: creating the 2021.09 Rakudo Compiler Release. Shortly thereafter, Claudio Ramirez created the associated Linux packages. This release is again mostly about fixes of problems and stability improvements: the next release is planned to have all of the exciting new-disp improvements!

Dispatch and Compiler Improvements

Jonathan Worthington describes the developments on the new-disp branch in the July/August Grant Report (r/rakulang, Twitter comments) and some more technical background on expected performance improvements. The final tweaks and fixes are being administered as this is written, to fix the final known issues, and to get performance at least on par with the main branch. After merge, more work on optimizations will be done.

Secure JSONification

Vadim Belman was triggered by a lively conversation on IRC about exposing database structures in an API, which prompted an extensive blog post titled “Secure JSONification?“, which in turn caused a lively discussion on /r/rakulang. Worth a read!

YAS Board Changes

Stuart Mackintosh provided an update on the changes of the board of Yet Another Society, which also includes a search for new board nominations: “The Board aims to represent the communities that it serves –  we currently lack diversity, so please encourage nominations for those who do not feel represented at the Foundation”.

My Butterflies

Alexey Melezhik has announced a beta-version of a site to see / leave reviews of… your favourite butterflies: “a place where one can rate software they like as well as write reviews”.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #131 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Explain “list” vs “destructuring” assignment
• [JVM] Support encoding/decoding for utf16le

Core Developments

• Sylvain Colinet fixed error reporting in some cases of the is sub from Test.

Development on the main branch was basically dormant in anticipation of the 2021.09 Compiler Release and the merge of the new-disp branch (which should be any time soon).

Questions about Raku

• Performance? by pasholnahuy228.
• How to get a “help” functionality in REPL by Hanselmann.
• What’s Your Preferred Font When Coding in Raku? by ro_mojosa.
• Set difference of two tokens by Wim Vanderbauwhede.
• *why* does list assignment flatten its left hand side? by Daniel Sockwell.
• What are the rules for re-binding? by Daniel Sockwell.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Interesting response by brian d foy.
• Looking for linter suggestions by JJ Merelo.
• Much smaller herd of yak by Jonathan Stowe.
• Don’t dislike it by Pudge.
• A good amount of books by JJ Merelo.
• The new Perl 6? by mic92.
• Butterflies in beta now by Alexey Melezhik.
• Uncompromisingly progressive by Ali.
• Don’t forget by Slava Pestov.
• Screaming at the end by 天むす名古屋.
• Analogous to the lisp version by Markus Holzer.
• Don’t even know that you’re using them by Jonathan Stowe.
• Lucas numbers by Suman Khanal.
• Too different by ひろぽん.
• Similar to Guice by Jonathan Stowe.
• More modern and agile by dominix.
• That was easy by Christian Hujer.
• The final language by Markus Holzer.
• A historic day! by Alexey Melezhik.
• Pretending it never happened? by reibitto.
• #131.1 in a Tweet by Markus Holzer.

Comments about Raku

• Surprisingly unpopular by pnut.
• On a final property by Ralph Mellor.
• A 7 or 11 by IggleSniggle.
• The mother of all Programming Language design problems by Ralph Mellor.
• On (un)flattening data by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku modules

• Sustenance Calorie tracker and diet planner by Andy Weidenbaum
• Rakudo::Options Rakudo Command Line Options by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Data::Reshapers Data reshaping functions for different data structures that are coercible to full arrays by Anton Antonov.

Updated Raku Modules

• Sparky by Alexey Melezhik.
• Terminal::UI by Brian Duggan.
• LibCurl by Curt Tilmes.
• CSS, CSS::Font::Resources, CSS::Stylesheet, CSS::Writer, HTML::Canvas, HTML::Canvas::To::PDF, LibXML, PDF::Content by David Warring.
• Set::Equality by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• EventSource::Server, FastCGI::NativeCall::Async by Jonathan Stowe.
• Digest by Lucien Grondin.
• zef by Nick Logan, Tony O’Dell.
• Tree::Binary by Simon Proctor.
• fez by Tony O’Dell.

Winding down

Yours truly had hopes to be able to announce the merge of the new-disp branch. Alas, this will most likely be by next week. In any case, a nice batch of new and updated modules in the Raku Programming Language, some nice and thought provoking blog posts. And it can’t be said enough: stay safe and stay healthy. Hope to see you again next week!