Justin DeVuyst has announced the 2021.12 Rakudo Compiler Release, their first release and hopefully the first of many to come! Claudio Ramirez quickly provided Linux packages for this release. And JJ Merelo published updated Docker Containers. And Anton Oks published a new Rakudo Star Windows image. Good to see such cooperation! And good to see more and more coverage about the Raku Programming Language!

Adventing Concludes

These are the final entries of the 2021 Raku Advent Blog:

• Day 21 – Santa Claus is Rakuing Along – Part 3 – Santa Takes A Break by Tom Browder.
• Day 22 – Santa Claus is Rakuing Along – Part 4 – The Santa Claus Reports by Tom Browder.
• Day 23 – The Life of Raku Module Authoring by Tony O’Dell (/r/rakulang comments).
• Day 24 – Packaging and unpackaging real good by JJ Merelo.
• Day 25 – Future-proofing the Raku Programming Language by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

FOSDEM 2022 Final Opportunity

The Call for Participation for the Raku DevRoom at FOSDEM 2022 is still open, as the deadline was moved to 31 December! This means it is still time to submit your proposal, but the deadline is coming in close!

Also, Vadim Belman is looking for help in documenting their FOSDEM talk.

From the Foundation

• Perl And Raku Conference in Houston Newsletter #1
• Support the Foundation – Potential Tax Savings

Doing it like a Cro

Anton Antonov created a video demonstration of the generation of Raku data wrangling code from natural language specifications.

Sylvain’s Corner

Sylvain Colinet started writing a series of articles about writing a SNES assembler / compiler / disassembler that previously escaped detection by yours truly:

• Day 1 – Writing a SNES assembler compiler/disassembler (/r/rakulang comments)
• Day 2 – First look at generating grammars (/r/rakulang comments)
• Day 3 – Assembling the Assembler

Flavio’s Corner

• Exponential Polymerization
• AoC 2021 completed!
• Ulam Sequence
• Bitstream decoding
• Ballistic

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #145 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Fix speshed native calls with rw args assigning into wrong target
• Relax cross-language revision role-class boundaries
• Make ranges coerce LHS into a numeric if range boundaries are numeric

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert fixed a race condition with NativeCall call-site initialization.
• Daniel Green implemented a faster integer to string conversion and added a warning on potential wrong precedence with ternaries.
• Clifton Wood improved the usage message in MAIN by also showing default values when applicable.

Questions about Raku

• Why can’t a sub access dynamic variables when used in a returned map? by Julio.
• Questions About Traversing a Directory Structure via dir() by s-ro-mojosa.
• Why can’t I iterate after an assignment? by marwy.
• Where is Rakudo Star 2021.12 source code by Jo Christian Oterhals.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Your IRC usage by Thib.
• Writing Parsers Casually by 徳永広夢.
• Gotta love “exegesis” by disaster prevention chihuahua.
• A rumor by Sawyer X.
• YetAnotherSponsor by German Perl-/Raku-Workshop.
• How short it could be made by Jo Christian Oterhals.
• Start making your modules by Tony O’Dell.
• Completed Syntax Scoring by Julio.
• Rakudo #152 released! by Dr. Roy Schestowitz.
• A new release, a new patch pumpking by JJ Merelo.
• Images at Docker Hub by JJ Merelo.
• Made by women by Jens Mönig.
• Have an -Ofun New Year! by JJ Merelo.
• Until next year! by JJ Merelo.
• Raku-zef container available by JJ Merelo.
• For REPL awesomeness by JJ Merelo.
• What to do on Boxing Day by Jonathan Stowe.
• Intuitive solution by Suman Khanal.
• Completed Dumbo Octopus by Julio.
• Feels like 40 years by Augie De Blieck Jr.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Merry Xmas day by yonghua.
• Rakudo-Star 2021.12 (Windows MSI and Linux RSTAR) packages by notna.
• Greeting Larry Wall: I will learn to love you new language by Maneesh Sud.
• Grammar Help by Paul Procacci.

Comments about Raku

• Very advanced by 7thaccount.
• Only used in obscure places by Aadaam.
• Decide for you by Ralph Mellor.
• ∞ out of the box by Tomasz Wegrzanowski.
• No easy way for variant A by Ralph Mellor.
• Counterintuitive Syntax by GDavid04.
• Standing out by Matthew S. Trout.
• A soft spot by Michael Kohl.
• An incoherent goal by db48x.

New Raku modules

• highlighter “highlight something inside a string” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Pod::To::PDF::Lite “Minimal Pod to PDF draft rendering” by David Warring.
• Git::Status “obtain status of a git repository” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Git::Add “add paths to a git repository” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Raku Modules

• uniname-words, Die, Slang::Roman, has-word, App::IRC::Log, App::Raku::Log by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• PDF::Tags, PDF::Tags::Reader by David Warring.
• ACME::Fez, fez by Tony O’Dell.
• XML::Canonical, Syndication, Doc::TypeGraph by JJ Merelo.
• Physics::Measure by Steve Roe.
• Digest::xxHash, TXN::Parser,TXN::Remarshal, TXN by Andy Weidenbaum.
• DateTime::Format by Clifton Wood.
• App::RaCoCo by Mikhail Khorkov.

Winding down

Hope everybody survived the festivities so far! Many people taking some time off, so yours truly will do the same: the Rakudo Weekly News will skip a week, and thus be published next on the 10th of January 2022. Meanwhile, continue to stay healthy and safe! See you in two weeks for the first Rakudo News, of 2022!