Arne Sommer was inspired by public transport developments in their native Oslo. This resulted in a cool new module Transit::Network, but also a serious blog post: Planning Public Transportation with Raku (/r/rakulang comments), a semi-serious Reindeer Express blog post, and a followup on the original: Bugs R Us – A Transit::Network Update (/r/rakulang comments). And Arne was still being able to find the time to do a blog post for the Weekly Challenge: Stealthy Calculator.

Adventing Continues

It’s also still Advent Calendar time! These are the entries of the past week:

• Day 14 – Santa Claus is Rakuing Along by Tom Browder.
• Day 15 – 1 year of Comma by Oleksandr Kyriukhin (/r/rakulang comments).
• Day 16 – Reindeer Express by Arne Sommer.
• Day 17 – Generic data structure traversals with roles and introspection by Wim Vanderbauwhede (/r/rakulang comments).
• Day 18 – Santa and the Magic Tree (M-Tree) by Steve Roe (/r/rakulang comments).
• Day 19 – Let it Cro by Jonathan Worthington.
• Day 20 – Create beautiful text charts by JJ Merelo (/r/rakulang comments).

If you’re up to it, there is still one slot available!

FOSDEM 2022 CFP expanded

The Call for Participation for the Raku DevRoom at FOSDEM 2022 is still open! The deadline has been moved to 31 December! This means you will have more time to consider your Raku presentation as there is still time to submit your proposal (comments on /r/rakulang: 1, 2)!

Fez Orgs Arrive

Tony O’Dell has implemented organizations in the zef ecosystem, which allow multiple people to be responsible for a distribution (which will be handy when moving Raku Community Modules to the zef ecosystem). Tony explains in Fez Orgs – A Winter Solstice Miracle!

Speedrunning

Tomasz Wegrzanowski decided to take the Raku Programming Language for a spin in episode 26 of the 100 Languages Speedrun. This resulted in some discussions on /r/rakulang and in the comments section of the blog post itself.

NNFS with Raku

Khalid Elboray has started a series of implementing Neural Networks with Raku. The first part: NNFS with Raku, was already published three weeks ago, but had somehow escaped detection by yours truly. My apologies!

Flavio’s Corner

Flavio Poletti was again very inspired by the Weekly Challenge and the Advent of Code 2021:

• Syntax scoring
• Calm Dumbo Octopuses
• A Trip in the caves
• Transparent origami

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #144 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Change nqp::radix(_I)? to return # chars converted (MoarVM)
• Fix segfault with void native calls
• Change nqp::radix(_I)? to return # chars converted (NQP)
• Adapt to nqp::radix(_I)? now returning # chars converted
• Fix the behaviour of Pair ~~ Pair
• Warn on potential problem with ternaries and infixes
• [JVM] Mention routine in error for wrong arity
• Fix removing proxies in native calls
• Fix segfaults due to concurrent hash access in parallel module loading

Core Developments

• Nicholas Clark fixed several issues with the optimization of empty hashes.
• Stefan Seifert fixed a race condition with the access of NativeCall bodies.
• Daniel Green optimised some integer to string conversions.
• Christian Bartolomäus again fixed several issues on the JVM backend.

Questions about Raku

• Is sub ::("☺") { say "works" } legal? by Daniel Sockwell.
• Raku REPL not working on MacOS/Homebrew by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Where does the $*REPO dynamic variable obtain its values, and how to change/alter them? by JJ Merelo.
• Immutable (uncontainerized) elements in arrays created by deepmap by Nikola Benes.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Completed Transparent Origami by Markus Holzer.
• Dealing with the new ecosystem by JJ Merelo.
• Almost the same as Kotlin by Kang-min Liu.
• Seeing a module coming up by JJ Merelo.
• Completed Extended Polymerization by Markus Holzer.
• A Productive Year by Dr. Roy Schestowitz.
• Always thankful by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Left to cool by Yi Zhao.
• Like what I see by Bear X.
• Refactoring time! by 0racle.
• Their atomic operator by Pär Björklund.
• 120 vs 20 by Kang-min Liu.
• Almost there by Yiorgos Adamopoulos.
• No flag splitting! by Gianni Ceccarelli.
• Sequences of types by regex? by Jingle Jaden.
• Couldn’t resist by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Completed Trick Shot by Markus Holzer.
• Day 17 by Wim Vanderbauwhede.
• Getting things done by Marc Chantreux.
• Yet to arrive by Programmer.
• Completed Seven Segment Search by Julio.
• Why not “Why Not” by Wim Vanderbauwhede.
• Look at this beauty! by Julia.
• Wonderful language by R.L. Dane.
• Failing to understand by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Cro evolvement by JJ Merelo.
• Too many issues by JJ Merelo.
• Hoping for the future by Social Justice Cleric.
• Completed Smoke Basin byJulio.
• Learned a few things by JJ Merelo.
• Slightly skeptical view on Larry Wall by Dr. Roy Schestowitz.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• div & mod don’t coerce arguments to Int? by Sean McAfee.

Comments about Raku

• Renamed and shaped on the fly by unixhero.
• Turning 34 Today (Hacker News).
• Spoiled by Markus Holzer.
• 65 Open Source Raku Software Projects (Open Source Libs)
• A mini language for rules by Mark Watson.

New Raku modules

• Transit::Network “Plan and set up public transportation routes or network” by Arne Sommer.
• Storable::Lite “Persistent storage of Raku classes and other types in the local user’s file system” by Tom Browder.
• SnowFlake “A tool for generating unique ID numbers” by ohmycloudy.
• Date::Christian::Advent “Calculate the date of the First Sunday of Advent in the Christian calendar” by Tom Browder.
• Date::Easter “Calculate the date of Easter in the Christian calendar” by Tom Browder.

Updated Raku Modules

• IRC::Client, IRC::Client::Plugin::Logger, Whateverable, Acme::Text::UpsideDown, uniname-words, Map::Match by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Sparrowdo, Sparky by Alexey Melezhik.
• Math::Polygons by Steve Roe.
• DBIish by Rod Taylor.
• PDF::Content, PDF::Class, PDF::API6, Font::AFM, PDF::Font::Loader, PDF::Tags by David Warring.
• AI::FANN by JJ Atria.
• Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::N, Gnome::Glib, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gdk3, Gnome::Gio, Gnome::Cairo by Marcel Timmerman.
• Text::Chart by JJ Merelo.
• Notify by ohmycloudy.
• fez by Tony O’Dell.
• Net::Ethereum by Konstantin Narkhov.

Winding down

Again, a Rakudo Weekly News with the emphasis on blog posts! And with a new wave coming up, it still can not be repeated often enough: stay healthy and stay safe! See you next week for the last Rakudo News, of 2021!