Anton Antonov reminded us that there is a cool Raku module in the ecosystem called Chemistry::Stoichiometry which allows you to do stochiometry: calculation of molecular masses for chemical compound formulas, and perhaps more interestingly doing chemical equations balancing! With support for many (natural) languages!

Navigator Update

A new version of Raku Navigator (a Visual Studio Code extension for the Raku Programming Language) has been announced by bscan. Looking pretty slick!

Documentation Update

Will Coleda informs us that the initial documentation online meetup will be at noon Eastern Time on Saturday, the 21st of May (that’d be 19:00 UTC). Please contact Will by mail or on the #raku-doc IRC channel for specifics (any modern web browser should be sufficient to be able to participate).

The Raku Conference

With feedback from the community, Andrew Shitov will most likely organize an on-line only Raku Conference, probably in August. It’s a bit sad, but with only 3 months to go and people already having made holiday plans, it seemed there would be insufficient attendance to warrant an in-person event.

Grant Proposals

Only a few days left to hand in your Grant Proposals for Raku projects to the Grant Committee for the May 2022 round!

StackOverflow Survey

It’s that time of the year again: the 2022 StackOverflow Developer Survey would like you to participate. Let’s make sure that “Raku” and “CommaIDE” are one of the multiple choice options next year, ok? 🙂

Alexey’s Corner

Alexey Melezhik has given an update on the Sparky CI, continuous integration testing using the Raku Programming Language.

given (2..5).pick {
    LEAVE say (now - ENTER now) ~ 'seconds  have passed';
    say "waiting $_ seconds";
    sleep $_;
}

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #165 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Allow DateTime.new(YYYY-MM-DD), and make DateTime.new faster overall
• Fix delegation to pun

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert added missing write barriers for atomic attribute binding and cas, and has been very busy on the RakuAST branch: such as being able to export things, allowing for specification of coercion types and the is copy trait on parameters.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed an issue with le on native strings (which existed since 2012)!
• Claudio Ramirez made sure that installable Rakudo packages are now also available for the recently released Fedora 37 Linux distribution.
• And some smaller performance tweaks.

Questions about Raku

• DateTime no longer accepts ISO8601 strings without the time part? by zeekar.
• Understanding Cro request/response cycle and memory use by Daniel Sockwell.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• Now with badges! by Alexey Melezhik.
• 6.9 by Joe Groff.
• Nasty unless by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Try and catch by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Reasonably by Ali.
• Syntactic numbering by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Brevity and elegance by Christian Hujer.
• Which character? by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Operators by Olivier Mengué.
• My favourite by cerebroteso.
• Integrating with C++ for $work by Solomon Foster.
• Unbracketed diamond by Mohammad S Anwar.
• Learned last month by Csaba Kissi.
• Not up-to-date by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Programming minister by aliceif.
• Added to list of tools by Malnormalulo.
• The opposite of not by Colin Barrett.
• What killed it by Alasdair Allan.
• Matching biiiig strings by Mohammad S Anwar.

Comments about Raku

• Introduction to Data Wrangling (video) by Anton Antonov.
• Not the primary goal by wpeckham.

Updated Raku Modules

• PDF::Content, PDF::Lite, PDF::Class, PDF, PDF::API6, PDF::Font::Loader by David Warring.
• Ecosystem::Archive::Update, Netstring, PSGI, SCGI by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Tomtit by Alexey Melezhik.
• Notify by ohmycloud.
• Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::N by Marcel Timmerman.
• Term::Choose by Matthäus Kiem.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• Chess by Lucien Grondin.

Winding down

For those of you puzzled about this week’s headline of the Rakudo Weekly News: this was the result of the popular vote for the Ukraine entry into the Eurovision Song Contest 2022. Of the maximum number of points a country could get (39 countries * 12 = 468), it received 439 (93.8%) from tele-voting (aka the public). Showing massive support from the ESC audiences!

Meanwhile the Rakudo Weekly News will continue to show Ukrainian inspired images in support of Ukrainian people, 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!