This week brought the sad news that David H. Adler has passed away. David had many hobbies, in which he all excelled (like knowledge about Monty Python, Doctor Who, really, really bad movies, to name but a few of them). The Perl / Raku community was only one of the communities he was part of.

David was involved in the very early Raku development process. More recently, he was involved in documenting various features of the Raku Programming Language. Attending many Perl and related Open Source Conferences, he was a familiar sight and a good person to spend time with (many pictures). He is sorely missed (FaceBook, /r/perl, blogs.perl.org, presentation from 2016).

Pod Editing

Alexandr Zahatski has announced a new version of Podlite, an easy-to-use editor for documenting Raku modules and programs (which even has an online version). New features are autocomplete and snippets (/r/rakulang comments).

Not so happy on the M1

Steve Roe elaborates on the journey with Raku on their new M1 laptop with MacOS Monterey in “Raku at the Monterey Docks“. This journey not being over just yet, so be sure to tune in for comments / suggestions and a possible follow-up blog post.

Grant News

Jonathan Worthington‘s Grant Proposal to build more optimizations upon the new Raku dispatch mechanism has been approved by the Grant Committee. This ensures at least 200 more hours of Jonathan‘s excellent development work!

FOSDEM 2022

No news yet from the FOSDEM organizers on the application for a Raku DevRoom at FOSDEM 2022.

Still 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!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #140 is available for your perusal.

No November release

The combination of still having some known issues resulting from the new-disp work, and the fact that there still is no official Rakudo Release Manager available, has made the core team decide to skip the November Rakudo Release. Instead an early December release is being targeted for the 4th of December 2021. To be picked up by the regular release schedule in January 2022 again.

The Rakudo Team is still looking for someone willing and able to take on the role of the release manager of the upcoming MoarVM, NQP and Rakudo releases. You don’t have to be an ace programmer, or have intimate knowledge of the code base. The only thing you need is some time, and maybe some hardware to run tests, and be able to follow the Release Guide.

If you are interested in doing this responsible job, please make yourself known on the #raku-dev channel on Libera.chat. Your efforts will be greatly appreciated!

New Pull Requests

• Optimize passing CPointer to nativecall ever so slightly
• Convert temp allocations into alloca or use FSA
• Fix out of bounds read of PHI facts in spesh
• Add IterationBuffer.unshift/prepend methods
• MAIN default values
• Consider Positional/Associative type parameters in optional defaults
• Make class A does B{ } error more awesome
• Don’t suggest method of the same name as “not found”

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert‘s work of the past months regarding JITting of NativeCall based in the new dispatch mechanism, was merged: this made the csv-ip5xs-20 benchmark almost 3x as fast.
• Stefan Seifert also fixed an issue with CATCH blocks setting $! when they really shouldn’t.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added support for specifying an Iterable with IterationBuffer.new, removed support for use experimental :collation and made Date.new(year,month,day) about 40% faster.
• And some smaller tweaks and fixes.

Questions about Raku

• When will we have checksums? by Ali.
• Where can I find the public key by Ali.
• Why is the range function acting weird? by Suman Khanal.
• What’s going on with these supplies? by Simon Proctor.
• An AWS secrets manager? by Jonathan Stowe.
• A factory bot for Red? by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Multiline comments in VS Code by Suman Khanal.
• How to check if input is an integer by hgdjfydgfdgjdgd.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• #139.2 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• What a start of the day! by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Super powerful multi methods by Felix.
• A bit booked out by Jonathan Stowe.
• Missed enhancement month by fkm.
• 1000 days update by Mohammad S Anwar.
• I’ll let myself out by Jeroen Baten.
• Nobody knows by Corly.
• A root class called Mu by D.Aoki (Amamori).
• What’s Raku? by ThePrimeagen.
• Why did it do that? by くまかば.
• Black Friday deals help by Yiorgos Adamopoulos.
• A pointless rewrite by Gary.
• Isn’t it? by hrsh7th.
• JortSort solution by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Just pushed RedFactory by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• An example of selective multiple dispatch by Ben Davies.
• Maybe too simple by Jonathan Stowe.
• On the Perl 6 saga by disaster prevention chihuahua.
• All done in Raku by JJ Merelo.
• #140.2 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• Persisting drama and uncertainty by Coloman Kane.
• Omnivorous food by ゆうぎ.
• Excellent built in parser / compiler support by The man with 2 doggos.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Looking for authors by JJ Merelo.
• Fixing the documentation by Marc Chantreux.
• Can’t make from a S/// ? by Marc Chantreux.

Comments about Raku

• Not even the same platform by nieve.
• Some clever Rakoons by elcaro.
• The Raku Programming Language by fishmaster.
• Maybe even Raku by dunefox.
• And there’s Raku by Mikeb85.
• On MoarVM and NativeCall by Ralph Mellor.
• Gave it a bug by The History Of Computing Podcast.
• On grapheme based indexing by Ralph Mellor.
• On slicing and dicing by Ralph Mellor.
• Explicit methods by darrenf.
• Not limited to ASCII by Tomasz Wegrzanowski.

New Raku modules

• Date::YearDay “Date object by year and day-of-year” by Tom Browder.
• RedFactory “A factory for testing code using Red” by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.

Updated Raku Modules

• Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.
• Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.
• IRC::Log, IRC::Log::Colabti, IRC::Log::Textual, IRC::Channel::Log, App::IRC::Log, App::Raku::Log, String::Color by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Crypt::SodiumPasswordHash, Crypt::SodiumScrypt, URI by Jonathan Stowe.
• Lingua::EN::Numbers by thundergnat.
• Net::Ethereum by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Math::Libgsl::Matrix by Fernando Santagata.
• WebService::AWS::Auth::V4 by Brad Clawsie.
• PDF::Content, CSS::Properties by David Warring.
• Logger by André Brás.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• DBIish by Rod Taylor.

Winding down

A week with sad news. Check in again next week for more upbeat Rakudo news. And it can’t be said enough: stay healthy and stay safe. See you then!