Matthew “Stephen” Stuckwisch has started playing around with the RakuAST branch of Rakudo, and has written a proof of concept module of a BASIC slang and reported about that on /r/rakulang. Cool stuff. And a great introduction on things to come in the Raku Programming Language!

FOSDEM 2022

A few days before FOSDEM 2022 actually started, Andrew Shitov reminded us about Larry Wall’s announcement 7 years earlier. The Raku DevRoom was a success, kudos to Andrew Shitov for organizing! And the videos are already available as well (although the .mp4 versions appear to be faulty at the time of writing: /r/rakulang comments).

The Next Iteration

ychaouche has started a series of blog posts about how they view the Raku Programming Language. The first instalment is called The next iteration of Perl is now a different language called Raku, which caused quite a few (positive) comments on /r/rakulang. Nice to see Raku from a different perspective!

Sizes and Ecosystems

Clifton Wood posted some thoughts about the Raku ecosystem and projects sizes and found the project with the most LOC!

Getting the Temperature

Jonathan Stowe made good on their promise to write a blog on making a home thermostat using a Raspberry Pi and Raku: Part 1: Getting the Temperature.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #151 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Serialize bigints in base 32, not base 10
• Make rakudo available on the GNU Hurd
• Define -D__USE_MINGW_ANSI_STDIO=1 for MinGW
• [JVM] Handle unsignedness for CStruct, CPPStruct, CUnion
• Enable onlystar proto wrapping

Other Core Developments

• Nicholas Clark removed all MoarVM code that was needed to support older bytecode versions.
• Stefan Seifert again did an impressive amount of work to make native unsigned integers first class citizens on MoarVM / nqp / Rakudo, and optimized the dispatcher handling of subsets.
• Daniel Green fixed a lot of (potential) issues on MoarVM that were found by an lgtm.com audit.
• Vadim Belman made it possible to turn on the MoarVM dispatch debugger with command-line arguments to the configuration (rather than needing to change the source).
• Christian Bartolomäus followed up on a lot of the work on native unsigned integers on the JVM backend, which has its challenges.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed a race-condition that affected the use of EVAL from multiple threads at the same time.
• Nick Logan fixed a race condition on temporary precompilation files.
• And some smaller tweaks and fixes!

Questions about Raku

• Dynamically created class with invocant constraint by hasrthur.
• How to flatten or stringify an object (esp. Match)? by itil memek cantik.
• Null regex not allowed Missing block by Steve Dondley.
• The inserted conditional code regex by itil memek cantik.
• To determine whether the current loop iteration is the last one or not by itil memek cantik.
• How can I implement 2d subscripts via AT-POS for different classes? by Steve Roe.
• Calling erf function in C from Raku: output don’t match by Suman Khanal.
• Perl’s $inp=<> , in Raku by itil memek cantik.
• Making a hash out of intertwined array of strings and integers by Immediate-Decision-3.
• Perl dot matches newline /s modifier in Raku by itil memek cantik.
• Calling C function that was compiled in C++ on Windows, Why is it not working? by Aftershock.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Surprising Raku performance by E7…..
• Also mentioning performance by E7…..
• Know why fonts look messed up by Julia.
• Cleaned up handling by Jonathan Stowe.
• Did it change? by Minejima Yuji.
• Through a coder’s eyes by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Run ado pipelines by Alexey Melezhik.
• I’m so old by Dylan Matthews.
• To put your $ where your $variable is by Zhuowei Zhang.
• Are k8s pods alive by Alexey Melezhik.
• Maybe Raku? by Charlie Stross.
• All Raku DevRoom tweets
• It gets done when it gets done by JJ Merelo.
• Getting the temperatures by Jonathan Stowe.
• Things that annoy me to no end by Leon Timmermans.
• It remains simple by Marc Chantreux.
• Reminds me of an Apocalypse byT-bone.
• Or Raku by JJ Merelo.

Comments about Raku

• With the exception of… by OskarS.
• Hello Raku! by Thibault Duponchelle.
• Built with Raku! by Reini Urban.
• A Raku dialect by Yichun Zhang.
• A spin-off language on opensource.com.
• Don’t forget by VisserWon.

New Raku modules

• shorten-sub-commands “allow partial specification of sub-commands” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Shodan “A raku-lang API client for Shodan” by Sarah Fuller.

Updated Raku Modules

• Ecosystem, Identity::Utils by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• zef by Nick Logan.
• SelectiveImporting by wukgdu.
• Ikoko by Jonathan Stowe.
• HarfBuzz::Subset, Font::FreeType, FontConfig, HarfBuzz::Shaper::Cairo, HarfBuzz, HTML::Canvas, PDF, HTML::Canvas::To::PDF by David Warring.
• Git::File::History by JJ Merelo.
• GtkLayerShell, Sway::PreviewKeys by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• Data::TextOrBinary, HTTP::HPACK by Jonathan Worthington.
• Intl::CLDR by Matthew “Stephen” Stuckwisch.
• Math::Libgsl::Histogram, Archive::Libarchive::Raw, Archive::Libarchive by Fernando Santagata.
• Digest by Lucien Grondin.
• Path::Finder by Leon Timmermans.
• License::SPDX by Jonathan Stowe.

Winding down

Yet again a week withs some interesting discussions! And amazing work by Stefan Seifert and many others. Next week there will be another episode of the Rakudo Weekly News, which will hopefully be read again by people who stayed safe!