Andrew Shitov is asking for the community’s opinion on whether or not to have an in-person Raku Conference in Riga in 2022 in The Raku Conference Update. Cancelling an in-person event now, means no financial risk, which seems safest.

FOSDEM 2022 Status

Being a serial organizer, Andrew Shitov also published the schedule for the Raku DevRoom at FOSDEM 2022 on Saturday 5 February (times in UTC, add one hour for CET):

• 9:00 Intro by Andrew Shitov.
• 9:05 “Keeping the Past to preserve the Future” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• 9:40 “Free Software, Dependency Management, and what I got wrong at FOSDEM 21” by Daniel Sockwell.
• 10:25 “Multi-language Data Wrangling and Acquisition Conversational Agents” by Anton Antonov.
• 11:25 “Class learning analytics” with Raku by JJ Merelo.
• 11:50 “From Unix shell (*sh) scripting to Raku” by Marc Chantreux.
• 12:50 “Decentralized Authentication” by Konstantin Narkhov.
• 13:30 “A Raku Grammar for Navigation Lights” by Steve Roe.
• 14:15 “Radically simple testing in Raku” by Daniel Sockwell.
• 14:45 “GitHub Actions (in|for) Raku” by JJ Merelo.
• 15:35 “Raku Steering Council Q&A Panel” by Andrew Shitov and the Raku Steering Council.

A full program indeed. Looking forward to it already!

Data Wrangling

Anton Antonov has started a new blog about data wrangling, with the motto:

One of my current life missions is the speeding up of the next AI winter coming. I have decided to use Raku to accomplish that mission.

And as a first post: Introduction to Data Wrangling with Raku.

Frugal Computing

Wim Vanderbauwhede has written a blog post about the need for low-carbon and sustainable computing, and what developers can do about it: Frugal computing: developer perspective. Not strictly Raku related, but important nonetheless (/r/rakulang comments).

Testing with Github Actions

JJ Merelo has written a short how-to do testing with Github Actions in: Testing your Raku Module using Github Actions.

Flavio’s Corner

• Blockchain under the sea
• Sea traffic jam
• Up and down
• Ready, set, go!
• Aiming for reuse

Wenzel’s Corner

• Manual Hypering
• Fooled by complexity

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #148 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Update information about methods for distributing modules
• Expand qq docs re esc sequences
• update-submodules.pl should handle linked worktrees created by git-worktree
• Remove the fixed size allocator (FSA)
• Fix handling of native unsigned integers (MoarVM)
• Fix handling of unsigned native integers (NQP)
• Introduce NYI as a sub
• Specify base of non base 10 invalid numbers
• Implement smartmatch as a dispatcher
• implement sub hyper / race

Core Developments

• Daniel Green‘s work of the past weeks on using mimalloc for memory allocation in MoarVM, was merged. This resulted in a 10% faster spectest (looks like caused by faster parsing and quicker startup).
• Nicholas Clark made sure that allocations of MVM registers are 8-byte aligned (needed for some pesky processor types, and probably good for processing speed in general). They also marked many functions in MoarVM as static for better optimizability.
• Stéphane Payrard added a Github Action to check links in markdown files in NQP.
• Stefan Seifert implemented several of the unsigned native int ops in NQP on the MoarVM as well as the JVM backend.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made accessing positional captures ($0, $1, …) about 5x as fast, Rat to FatRat coercion (and vice-versa) about 5x as fast, array slices without adverbs about 2.5x as fast, and an unsuccessful call to .first about 40% faster.
• Vadim Belman fixed an issue if an Enum was created with one of the values having the same name as a core class.
• And many smaller tweaks and fixes.

Questions about Raku

• How do I capture default arguments with |c? by Steve Dondley.
• Formatting by Suman Khanal.
• How do I generate numbered lists with pod? by Steve Dondley.
• Colored output with prove6 on Mac? by anki_steve.
• Getting value without a container error by Steve Dondley.
• What counts as a newline for *source* files? by Daniel Sockwell.
• Ways to improve syntax highlighting speed with neovim? by anki_steve.
• How can I use EVAL to pass arguments to subroutines? by Steve Dondley.
• Enforcing single instances from the metamodel by JJ Merelo.
• How can I make my module more elegant/Raku like? by anki_steve.
• Enforcing read-only attributes from the metaclass by JJ Merelo.
• What is your favourite feature of Raku? by Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer.
• compose_attributes is apparently called before attributes are composed by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Looking for a new project by Stephan Kämper.
• More than combined by KeyJ.
• Just too different by Mark Gardner.
• A little faster by 奈良阪.
• Would be nice if first done in Raku by Jonathan Stowe.
• Too much of a change by Bas Meijer.
• Skip over? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Still need to plug in by vass.
• Parsing Open Office spreadsheets by Clifton Wood.
• Testing with Github Actions by JJ Merelo.
• Meta. What Why and How by JJ Merelo.
• Only a big guy by 舒特比 Φ ω Φ.
• Still called Perl? by Hsins.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Removing ‘ characters by Richard Hainsworth.

Comments about Raku

• On virtual machines by Nikos Vaggalis.
• My mindset has changed by Pawel Pabian.
• A new programming language? by JohnDeHope.
• Comments in Raku by moonCake (video).
• Name every programming language by AwesomJose.
• Officially changed by Guhan.
• Looked familiar by hassancf.

New Raku modules

• String::Utils “Provide some optimized string functions” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Identity::Utils “Provide utility functions related to distribution identities” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Karabiner::CompModGenerator “Generate complex modifcations for the Karabiner-Elements app on macOS” by Steve Dondley.
• NYI “Provide shortcut to X::NYI” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Pleroma “Interface for Pleroma’s API” by qorg11.

Updated Raku Modules

• Mac::Applications::List by Steve Dondley.
• Physics::Measure by Steve Roe.
• PDF, Base64::Native, PDF::ISO_32000 by David Warring.
• TAP by Leon Timmermans.
• Crane by Andy Weidenbaum.
• Ecosystem::Archive by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Text::Utils by Tom Browder.
• Terminal::LineEditor by Geoffrey Broadwell.
• OpenSSL, zef by Nick Logan.
• DateTime::Format by Clifton Wood.
• Unicode::PRECIS, Gnome::N by Marcel Timmerman.

Winding down

A not too shabby Rakudo Weekly News on, what many people will have you believe, is a Blue Monday. Au contraire! Should you feel you missed all of these fine Raku Advent Posts, here’s an easy overview for you to peruse. In any case, continue to stay healthy and safe for all of the Rakudo Weekly News editions of 2022!