This week’s good news is that the about 2 months of work of Stefan Seifert to properly support native unsigned integers, was merged. This work, and Daniel Green‘s work on using the mimalloc memory allocation library, however caused some unexpected ecosystem fallout. Instead of reverting all of this work (which would have been a big task in itself), it was decided to move forward by skipping the 2022.01 Rakudo Compiler release: the next release will be 2022.02. Which has an odd symmetry to it!

Grant Proposals

Have an idea for a project in the Raku Programming Language, but cannot afford to do so? Maybe it is an idea to submit a Grant Proposal for it then! The January 2022 round will close by the end of the month!

ToC

Alexandr Zahatski (the author of the Podlite editor) has written about the =Toc element in the Raku Documentation Language.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #149 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Document handles(**)
• Convert free_at_safepoint from a vector to a linked list and eliminate its associated mutex
• Use libc allocator functions for NativeCall
• Add an lgtm config file
• Remove dead code from MoarVM and JVM extops

Other Core Developments

• Daniel Green added missing precedence information on the +<, +>, ~< and ~> infix operators.
• Vadim Belman re-implemented smartmatch as a dispatcher, using the new capabilities that the new-disp work brought.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made the .unique, .repeated and .squish methods on native arrays about 3x as fast.
• And some other smaller fixes.

Questions about Raku

• Do type annotations help generate better code? by Julia.
• Why are arrays passed as arguments mutable but scalars are not? by Steve Dondley.
• IDEA community plugin broken? by mennof.
• Seeking a more dynamic regex (or alternative) by zeekar.
• Is IO async? by arthurborisow.
• for IO.lines incredibly slow by NoSuchKotH.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Schedule of Raku DevRoom at FOSDEM by Andrew Shitov.
• OTOBO sponsoring by German Perl-/Raku-Workshop.
• An ad-hoc integrated timing framework by Julia.
• Uploaded to Chocolatey by brian d foy.
• With regular expressions in mind by Michael Zedeler.
• Won’t compile with any method by JJ Merelo.
• Exploring the metamodel by JJ Merelo.
• Learning from bad code by JJ Merelo.
• Can read it from Raku by Jonathan Stowe.
• Talking about … by こばやし ‘にらたま’ けんいち.
• cOuLd nOt rEsIsT by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• 100% 5-star! by Moritz Lenz.
• Documenting and learning by Jonathan Stowe.
• A command like sed by びしょ～じょ.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Benchmark for Scala, Ruby and Perl by Jon Smart.
• How to use WHY on a object’s method? by David Emanuel da Costa Santiago.

Comments about Raku

• Favourite feature by Daniel Sockwell.
• Thinking of Raku by brandmeyer.
• An important topic by bobthecimmerian.
• A few suggestions by Ralph Mellor.
• The case for a modern programming language by bshanks.
• Same results in Raku by Athanasius.

New Raku modules

• Zef::Configuration “Manipulate Zef configurations” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Ecosystem::Archive::Update “Updating the Raku Ecosystem Archive” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Ecosystem “Accessing a Raku Ecosystem” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Spreadsheet::ODS “Work with Open Document (ODS) spreadsheets” by Stefan Seifert.
• MetamodelX::Dataclass “A dataclass for Raku” by JJ Merelo.

Updated Raku Modules

• Karabiner::CompModGenerator by Steve Dondley.
• Gnome::N, Gnome::Glib, Gnome::Cairo by Marcel Timmerman.
• AccountableBagHash, Updown, String::Utils, Ecosystem::Archive::Update, Identity::Utils, P5getnetbyname, P5built-ins by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Digest::SHA1::Native by Brian Duggan.
• Base64::Native, LibXML by David Warring.
• Crane, Sustenance by Andy Weidenbaum.
• Test::Output by JJ Merelo.
• TAP, Path::Finder by Leon Timmermans.
• OpenSSL by Nick Logan.
• HTTP::Server::Middleware::JSON by Tony O’Dell.
• Date::Names by Tom Browder.
• Mac::Applications::List by Steve Dondley.
• DateTime::Timezones, Timezones::ZoneInfo by Matthew Stuckwisch.

Winding down

Blog post wise, a quiet week. But at least 15 people worked on new and existing modules in the ecosystem, so that’s not half bad. As always, continue to stay healthy and safe. Hope to see you next week for another episode of the Rakudo Weekly News!