This week the Raku Community on Reddit makes it to main article on the Rakudo Weekly News. In the roughly two years since the rename, the number of subscribers made it to a 1000! Which does not really reach the number of subscribers on the previous reddit just yet, but on the other hand that had been in use for almost 9 years! And to all new Rakoons: welcome to the Raku Programming Language.

Grants

Jonathan Worthington reports on the completion of the grant for the new Raku dispatch mechanism (/r/rakulang comments) and submitted a grant proposal for building optimizations upon the new Raku dispatch mechanism. Check them out and leave any comments you may have!

That time of the year is coming!

Only a few weeks to go, and it’s Advent Calendar time again! Make sure you get a slot in this year’s Advent Calendar for the Raku Programming Language, by adding your blog post proposal to the preliminary list of authors and articles!

Alexey’s Corner

Alexey Melezhik had two announcements about the My Butterflies – Friendly Software Reviews Network: Sticky releases and a weekly Raku update feature.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #137 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Improve documentation of the list routine
• Migrate special return to callstack and simplify return handling
• Another attempt at jitting some not so common ops that are still seen bailing in a spesh log
• Dispatcher replace arg syscall (MoarVM)
• Eliminate hllbool/boot-boolify-boxed-int pairs in spesh
• Dispatcher replace arg syscall (NQP)
• [JVM] Deal with invalid input in decodertakeline
• Add a IterationBuffer.new(iterable) candidate
• Clarify let and temp operators
• Use dispatcher-replace-arg in some dispatchers
• Add a Str.substr-between method
• Add a Str.substr-before method
• Add a Str.substr-after method
• Add a Str.rinse method

Core Developments

• Daniel Green worked on JITting more ops, fixed an issue with the primality of negative numbers and fixed Buf.gist when parameterized with an unsized type.
• Stefan Seifert fixed an issue when a frame had more than 8192 locals and fixed unnecessary boxing of native return types.
• Vadim Belman improved the error message when trying to assign to a Nil value, and made sure you can not call .new on enums.
• Nick Logan fixed an issue that was causing unnecessary pre-compilation of modules.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen improved the performance of Str.subst, Str.match, Str.subst-mutate and Str.trans on the MoarVM backend, and made sure the return value of Str.match is threadsafe.
• Peter du Marchie van Voorthuysen removed a redundant .list method.
• And some smaller tweaks and fixes.

Questions about Raku

• Why is our %dict is Map is export an error? by Wim Vanderbauwhede.
• Fix the msi installer by Ali.
• Questions on commercial Raku development by s_brady.
• Problems installing GD and GD::Raw on Windows by jddddddddddd.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Looking for authors! by JJ Merelo.
• Share your experience! by Alexey Melezhik.
• Feedback for grant proposal by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Like to see it take off by Noah Scales.
• It was a no show by Noah Scales.
• Frustrating by Markus Holzer.
• It is the future by Noah Scales.
• Better to fix the language by Travis W. Fast.
• Taking longer to get to insights by Henk Poley.
• Not sure about a compelling argument by Gina Marie Maini.
• A big step up in terms of readability by A vampire is a neck-romancer.
• Interfacing with GtkLayerShell by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• Parsing Sway window manager’s config by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• Showing key bindings by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• Implement in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• Most appropriately by Jonathan Koren.
• In the name of by 佐藤 [退席中].
• A new speed record! by H.Merijn Brand.
• Trying to make awesome errors by Claudio Ramirez.
• No-one cared anymore by masukomi hates bigots.
• Automatic reminders by Jonathan Stowe.
• Not wanting to use awk by Joan Ortega.
• Best unicode support by Fake “Unicode.”.
• Beautiful algorithm by Julia.
• Setting an “expected” message by Jonathan Stowe.
• Lightspeed by nil2.
• Merging DBIish Oracle fixes by Jonathan Stowe.
• How to install a new version with rakubrew by Julia.
• Rewriting the Linux Kernel by Brendan Bouffler.
• Already by Стэн Кави.
• Bidis in source code by Jonathan Stowe.
• #137.1 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Primitive benchmark comparison (parsing LDIF) by Norman Gaywood.
• Rakudo-Star 2021.10 (Windows MSI and Linux RSTAR) packages by notna.
• A nice touch by Sean McAfee.
• How do I turn a real into and array of Integers? by ToddAndMargo.

Comments about Raku

• On chatting with Rakoons by Ralph Mellor.
• On Sway::Config by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• On origin stories by Daniel Sockwell.
• Extended subset feature by riffraff.
• Being a whacky language by gavinray.
• On sorting by Markus Holzer.
• On operator precedence by zokier.

New Raku modules

• Geo::Location “Provides location data for astronomical and other programs” by Tom Browder.
• GtkLayerShell “Interface with the Gtk Layer Shell” by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• Sway::Config “Parsing Sway window manager’s config” by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• Sway::PreviewKeys “Show preview windows for Sway modes’ key bindings” by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• Data::Generators “Generating random strings, words, pet names, vectors, and (tabular) datasets” by Anton Antonov.
• Ecosystem::Archive “Interface to the Raku Ecosystem Archive” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Terminal::ANSIParser “ANSI/VT stream parser” by Geoffrey Broadwell.

Updated Raku Modules

• PatternMatching by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• Math::Libgsl::Constants, Math::Libgsl::Eigensystem, Math::Libgsl::RandomDistributionzef by Fernando Santagata.
• App::IRC::Log, App::Raku::Log, IRC::Channel::Log, IRC::Log, IRC::Log::Colabti, IRC::Log::Textual, paths by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• OpenSSL by Nick Logan.
• DateTime::US by Tom Browder.
• CSS, LibXML by David Warring.
• Gnome::Gio, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Terminal::UI by Brian Duggan.
• zef by Nick Logan.
• Text::CSV by H.Merijn Brand.
• Data::Reshapers, Lingua::NumericWordForms by Anton Antonov.
• Physics::Measure, Physics::Error, Physics::Unit by Steve Roe.
• Net::Ethereum by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Async::Command, MessageStream, POSIX::getaddrinfo, KHPH by Mark Devine.

Winding down

Wow, so much new stuff to look at and/or try out! And a new record for the test-t benchmark! Another good week. Please don’t forget to think about the Raku Advent posts coming up. Less than a month to go now until the first one! See you next week for more Rakudo news.