With only being a few hours late to make it to last week’s Rakudo Weekly News, Oleksandr Kyriukhin was nonetheless glad to be able to announce another release of the Comma IDE for subscribers, as well as a new free Comma Community Edition! Check out the changes! And if you don’t know about Comma, check out the FAQ!

FOSDEM 2022

As was announced a few weeks ago, FOSDEM 2022 will be an online only event. This means that the dev-rooms will also be online. A call for participation has been made (/r/rakulang comments).

Fedora 35

Claudio Ramirez informs us that all Rakudo packages now also support the just released Fedora 35.

Wenzel’s Corner

Wenzel produced three blog posts this week:

• TIMTOWTDItime (/r/rakulang comments)
• Should it mutate or not? YES! (/r/rakulang comments)
• 2nd class join

Alexey’s Corner

Alexey Melezhik is looking for feedback on the future of #mybfio.

That time of the year is coming closer!

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!

On Junctions and Smartmatching

A few months ago Ralph Mellor opened a problem-solving issue about the left side of ~~ with regards to Junctions. This has gotten a lot of discussions on that and related issues in the past week. So this maybe a good time for you to read and give your comments!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #138 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• JIT ctx(outer|caller)(skipthunks)?
• Make “raku” the authority of core modules
• Remove support for use experimental :collation
• Disallow cmp with a Junction
• DEPRECATE smartmatching on Junctions
• Fix segfaults when multiple threads initialize dynamics
• Support Terminal::LineEditor in the Raku REPL

Core Developments

• Zhuomingliang provided a better fix for a GC issue.
• Jonathan Worthington optimized frame allocation, fixed a thinko in the resumption logic and a thread safety issue with intern lookups.
• Stefan Seifert made sure that boolification/intification pairs are eliminated in spesh already, and fixed builds done with --valgrind, a race condition with JIT compiled dispatches, and removed an unnecessary NULL check on a hot code path.
• Nicholas Clark fixed several libffi / NativeCall issues.
• Timo Paulssen optimized a common case of replacing one argument by another in dispatch.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen introduced the RAKUDO_PRECOMPILATION_PROGRESS environment variable, which shows which modules are being (re-)precompiled.
• Ben Davies fixed handling of constrained Mu parameters in signature smartmatching.
• And some other smaller fixes and tweaks.

Questions about Raku

• How can I check if a character is an emoji? by anna_g0mez.
• Difficulties installing Cro: “Failed to find dependencies: CBOR::Simple“ by jsaigle.
• Getting intermittent errors by Mohammad S Anwar.
• MacOS Monterey — getting “Homebrew is not support on ARM processors” by Steve Roe.
• Documentation for the object Signature: ” … different name for a named argument than the variable name” by Keith Hardy.
• Ease of Distributing Raku Programs? by flwyd.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• The new mascot by Ali.
• Get notified! by Alexey Melezhik.
• Hope it’s ok by Mark Gardner.
• Very, very equal by Paul Cochrane.
• Full Script Power! by German Perl-/Raku-Workshop.
• ++ by Wim Vanderbauwhede.
• With lazy lists by Dr. Elden Wayne Whalen III, ShD.
• Christmas coming up soon by Hayden Stainsby.
• Follow the monks! by Jesús M. Navarro.
• A long year solution by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Check out the #raku-news channel by Alexey Melezhik.
• In one line by Fideo Kojima.
• Shortcuts! by Alexey Melezhik.
• With a pizza slice by Alexey Melezhik.
• Improvement depends on how critical the path is by JJ Merelo.
• Generics to the next level by Howard C. Shaw III.
• Can use it in Raku by Mark Gardner.
• Down to 90 characters by Jonathan Stowe.
• Used to endlessly waiting by Yiorgos Adamopoulos.
• Creating stuff? by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Re: A nice touch by Ralph Mellor.
• junctions with given/when by Joseph Brenner.
• Re: Windows tutorial needed (Todd?) by ToddAndMargo.

Comments about Raku

• Perhaps MoarVM? by Ralph Mellor.
• On implementations by eyepopslikeamosquito.
• Reminds me a little by 7thaccount.
• Reflections on a decade of MoarVM (official video link).
• Not quite syntax by dragonwriter.
• Raku Guide on GitPlanet.
• Whipping up math-notation by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku modules

• fornax “Collection of tools to visualize Path Finding Algorithms” by Andinus.
• Rakudo::CORE::META “Provide zef compatible meta-data for Rakudo” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Array::Sorted::Map “Provide a Map interface for 2 sorted lists” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Array::Unsorted::Map “Provide a Map interface for 2 unsorted lists” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Raku Modules

• GtkLayerShell by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• SuperMAIN by Claudio Ramirez.
• App::RaCoCo by Mikhail Khorkov.
• Geo::Location by Tom Browder.
• Ecosystem::Archive, Array::Sorted::Util, eigenstates, Bits, silently, paths, uniname-words, unprint, Set::Equality, Test::Assertion, Text::Flags, Text::MathematicalCase, Today, Unix::errno, Sub::Memoized, Adverb::Eject, Attribute::Predicate, Game::Covid19, Method::Also, Migration::RTtoGithub, Slang::Subscripts, hide-methods by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Terminal::ANSIParser, Terminal::LineEditor, URI by Geoffrey Broadwell.
• Blin, OpenSSL, zef by Nick Logan.
• CSS::Font::Resources, CSS::Properties, PDF::Font::Loader::CSS by David Warring.
• Gnome::Gio by Marcel Timmerman.
• Lingua::EN::Numbers by thundergnat.
• Sustenance by Andy Weidenbaum.
• Net::Ethereum by Konstantin Narkhov.

Winding down

Cool fixes and improvements deep under the hood. Quite a few new modules and updated modules. Some thought provoking discussions. Not a bad week at all! Pretty sure next week will come up with more Rakudo news. See you then!