Daniel Sockwell was inspired by a blog post a few weeks ago about a bouncing balls demo. The result is a new framework for learning Raku, but this time with some nice graphics: Learn Raku With: HTML Balls. Apart from the technical points, it’s also a great way (for people without much programming experience) to get involved with Raku while creating graphics and animations, rather than textual output. Check it out!

Alexey’s Corner

Alexey Melezhik continued to work on mybf.io (platform for software reviews with social network aspects) and wrote an introductory blog about it (/r/rakulang, HackerNews comments). Yet another nice application running on the Raku Programming Language!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #135 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Document pop, shift, push and append more concisely
• Add some context to capture arg exceptions
• Fix segfault finding dynamics after deopt
• Fix handling of constrained Mu parameters in signature smartmatching

Core Developments

• Jonathan Worthington fixed compilation of multiple levels of resumption, fixed issues that where plaguing callwith, and regained performance of calls with many named parameters.
• Daniel Green made it possible for many more MoarVM ops to get JITted, and fixed a few memory leaks missed by --full-cleanup.
• Stefan Seifert fixed a memory corruption issue caused by specific types of mixins, and a fixed a segfault when one thread is de-optimizing while another is doing a dynamic variable lookup.
• Christian Bartolomäus added support for utf16le encoding, and fixed the use of nqp::p6firstflag, both on the JVM backend.
• Nick Logan fixed an issue with -Ilib and precompilation that might use the wrong pre-compiled file in some situations.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added a .Version coercer to Cool objects.
• And some smaller tweaks and fixes.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Try some pattern matching by JJ Merelo.
• #134.1 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• An old shirt by Mark Gardner.
• Has operator prefixes by eevee.
• On materialisation of parameterised roles by Jonathan Stowe.
• On lack of Subject by Jonathan Stowe.
• Fun tasks! by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Compiled or interpreted? by Mohammad S Anwar.

Comments about Raku

• Raku’s surprisingly good Lisp impression on /r/lisp.
• Love to be able to spend more time by dragonwriter.
• Mutually embedding languages by Ralph Mellor.
• On coercion from Rat to Num by Steve Roe.
• Why the name on Debian Wiki.
• A well known feeling by Ralph Mellor.
• On Scoping by Ralph Mellor.
• On confusing treatment of sigils by eyespoplikeamosquito.
• On tribal instincts by Rolf Langsdorf.

New Raku modules

• Cro::HTTP::BodyParser::JSONClass by Jonathan Stowe.
• Learn::Raku::With by Daniel Sockwell.

Updated Raku Modules

• Curry by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• Kivuli, WebService::AWS::S3 by Jonathan Stowe.
• Sustenance by Andy Weidenbaum.
• PDF::Content, PDF::Font::Loader, PDF::Tags, PDF::Class by David Warring.
• Protobuf by Brian Duggan.
• App::IRC::Log, App::Raku::Log, IRC::Channel::Log, uniname-words by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Physics::Measure, Physics::Error, Physics::Unit by Steve Roe.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Config::BINDish by Vadim Belman.
• Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• DateTime::Timezones by Matthew ‘Stephen’ Stuckwisch.

Winding down

About two years ago, the first issue of the Rakudo Weekly News was published. A lot has happened since, albeit most of it during the Covid-19 crisis. Which has prevented basically all in-person meetings during the new community building process. Hopefully a year from now, yours truly will have been able to report on many Raku in-person events. In any case, two years of Rakudo Weekly News is a nice little cause for celebration :-).

Also a little cause for celebration: the Raku IRC log server has gone into beta after several months of tweaking and development (clocking in at 6000+ lines of code and templates, and more than 500MB of text going back to 2005). Please try it out and let us know what you think about it.

With less than a week to go until the 2021.10 Rakudo Compiler release that will make the new-disp work go mainstream, Jonathan Worthington is working on fixing the final performance issues (such as creating a performant megamorphic dispatch handler). So, check in again next week for more news about the Raku Programming Language in these exciting times!