Justin DeVuyst has done all the work to release the 2022.04 version of the Rakudo compiler of the Raku Programming Language, which contains a new will complain trait for more targeted error messages when type-checks fail (courtesy of Vadim Belman). Pre-compiled archives will be available shortly. Claudio Ramirez‘s Linux packages now also supporting the new Ubuntu 22.04 release!

Conference Proposals

Matthew Stuckwisch invites you to submit a proposal for presentation at the first in-person conference since 2019 in Houston, TX. The deadline is coming very near!

Vadim’s Corner

Vadim Belman wrote two blog posts: one about the new will complain trait (/r/rakulang comments), and one about the pros and cons of the various ways of dealing with race conditions.

Scimon’s Corner

Simon Proctor write a blog post about how to deal with updates of a very large JSON file in a server setting (/r/rakulang comments).

Alexey’s Corner

Alexey Melezhik provided an update on Sparky CI, continuous integration testing using Sparky.

Siavash’s Corner

Siavash Askari Nasr reports about their work to make flymake-rakudo, which creates an Emacs flymake checker for Raku syntax checking. Check it out, especially if you’re an Emacs user.

say "a".."c" Z=> 1..*  # (a => 1 b => 2 c => 3)

And that you can use that to easily create a hash with mapping of strings to numerical values?

my %hash = "a".."c" Z=> 1..*;
say %hash;  # {a => 1, b => 2, c => 3}

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #162 is available for your perusal. And the previous Weekly Challenge #161 also, of course!

New Pull Requests

All the Pull Requests of the past 2 weeks have already been merged or closed.

Core Developments

• Elizabeth Mattijsen added an IO::Path.dir-with-entries method, continued their work on speeding up compilation and module installation, and added a .Failure coercion method.
• Vadim Belman implemented the will complain trait (for variables, parameters, attributes, etc.), for better error messages on typecheck failures.
• Daniel Green speeded up exponentiation by Ints.
• Daniel Sockwell made the my :($a,$b) := 42,666 syntax legal, as per speculation, and fixed an issue with using min or max giving different results when being used as a sub, or as an infix operator.
• And many, many more smaller tweaks and fixes.

Questions about Raku

• How do I use any of the CommonMark modules to pass options to the commonmark library? by Steve Dondley.
• Error while compiling regex function, why am I getting this issue? by Homerian.
• How do I remove particular sets of characters and not others? by Homerian.
• More bad text adventure code! by hhcryfqnut.
• Web scraping with Raku? by s-ro_mojosa.
• How to check if a program is present in the system? by Suman Khanal.
• move function does not work in Windows by Suman Khanal.
• Is it possible to bind a wildcard value to a variable inside a given block? by Luis Alfonso Buelvas Betancour.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• 159.1 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• 159.2 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• More and more astonished bymarderh.
• A subset of Red by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• Solving wordle manually by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• A fiasco by mcorbin.
• Couldn’t resist by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Sparky CI for DBIish by Alexey Melezhik.
• Interesting feature by macabeus.
• Hot swapping by Simon Proctor.
• Secretly want to kebab by ThePrimeagen.
• A different language by Kensuke Nagae.
• Disappearing interest by AmirMohammad.
• A fan of the VM by JF Bastien.
• No heavy use by omps.
• No weekly that week by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• 161.1 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• 161.2 in a tweet by Markus Holzer.
• A non-regex solution by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Don’t ask me why by Julia.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Help with promises, supplies and channels by David Emanuel da Costa Santiago.
• Checking MAIN arguments by Luca Ferrari.

Comments about Raku

• What about whenever? by Ralph Mellor.
• Thanks to stackful coroutines by Mercenaries.
• Dominance starting to slip by Ralph Mellor.
• Slangs, I love it by Bitsoflogic.
• Not happy with it by Balduin_Bankerotti.
• Homework on Chegg.
• Raku open source projects? on GitPlanet.
• Different signatures by cestith.
• A conceptual loose end by Ralph Mellor.
• A “fib” answer by Hydrazer.
• Replacement for quick scripting by klibertp.
• Supporting all the things you mention by moonchild.
• Enforcing all the times by moonchild.

New Raku Modules

• Net::NetRC by Humberto Massa.
• Lingua::StopwordsISO by Anton Antonov.
• Dan::Pandas by Steve Roe.
• Repository::Precomp::Cleanup by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Raku Modules

• Lingua::Stem::Bulgarian by Anton Antonov.
• Digest by Lucien Grondin.
• Gnome::Gio by Marcel Timmerman.
• CBOR::Simple by Geoffrey Broadwell.
• Text::CSV by H.Merijn Brandt.
• FontConfig, PDF::Grammar by David Warring.
• IO::Path::ChildSecure by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• JSON::RPC by Pawel Pabian.
• Cairo by Timo Paulssen.
• WebService::GitHub by Patrick Böker.
• Log::Async by Brian Duggan.
• AttrX::Mooish by Vadim Belman.

Winding down

The Rakudo Weekly News continues to show the Ukrainian inspired images support of the people in Ukraine, and any other people who are trying to make an end to the Russian aggression in Ukraine. Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

In the mean time, please stay safe, stay healthy, keep up the good work!

If you like what I’m doing, committing to a small sponsorship would mean a great deal!