The announcements of presentations of the second Raku Conference on 13-14 August 2022, keep coming in. So far, the following presentations have been accepted:

• Welcome to the Raku Conference 2022
• The Raku Cup of Justice
• Postmodernism, futurism, and Raku
• Implementing Machine Learning algorithms in Raku
• Gradual Types for Pandas
• Tomtit – Raku Task Runner
• Raku Steering Council Q&A
• Looking for clues with rak

But that’s not nearly enough yet! So please consider submitting a presentation proposal, if you are:

• a module developer, wanting more exposure for your module
• a user, telling about how you use Raku yourself
• a core developer, explaining newer or older core features
• or simply have a wacko idea that you need to talk about!

Formats are lightning talk (5 minutes), short presentation (20 minutes), presentation (45 minutes), tutorial, class and workshop.

Documentation Meetup

The minutes of the online meeting of the documentation team on 9 July, are online. You can always check the #raku-doc IRC channel for more information about the documentation effort.

Anton’s Corner

Anton Antonov continues to be on a roll yet again this week, with two blog posts:

• Introducing Text::Plot (/r/rakulang comments).
• Trie based classifiers evaluation

Steve’s Corner

Steve Dondley went spelunking in their code with Rockin’ with Raku – A Detailed Walk Through of Code for Finding Specific Prime Numbers (/r/rakulang comments).

Wenzel’s Corner

Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer was in search of truth this week in The truth is a hard problem as a response on Steve Dondley‘s post (/r/rakulang comments)!

Steven’s Corner

Steven Lembark has updated their slide deck from a 2016 presentation to Raku: Climbing a Tree – Refactoring FindBin::libs for Raku.

my @a = ^10;
say @a.grep: * %% 2;  # (0 2 4 6 8)
say @a.map: { $_ if $_ %% 2 }  # (0 2 4 6 8)

This is possible because a failed if (or with or elsif or etc…) will return Empty, which will cause the iterator to just skip that value. How can you check that? With do!

dd do if 0 { }  # Empty

As to why you would use map over grep? Well, map‘s handling of Empty is highly optimized, causing the same code with map to be up-to 2x as fast as using grep. But note, this only affects the overhead of iterating: if your code inside the grep or map is very expensive, you won’t see much difference!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #173 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Solution for #330 – Deprecate modules.raku.org

Core Developments

• Vadim Belman optimized the coercion protocol using the new dispatch mechanism, resulting in up-to 3x as fast handling of simple coercions.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen implemented subroutine versions of the head, skip and tail logic on iterables (allowing them to be used with ==> aka the feed operator). And made the sub versions of elems and end 3x as fast for native arrays.
• Stefan Seifert continued working on the RakuAST branch, without any immediately visible results (but looking very promising generally).

Questions about Raku

• Operator for 2’s complement arithmetic? by zentrunix.
• NativeCall to Rust FFI CArray Size Limitations – SegFault by Steve Roe.
• zef can’t find Math::Trig by FirefighterShoddy641.
• Is it possible to create subroutine signatures at run time? by Steve Dondley.
• What’s the minimum code required to make a NativeCall to the md_parse function in the md4c library? by Steve Dondley.
• Looking for Guidance on getting NativeCall working with the md4c library for converting markdown files by Steve Dondley.

Meanwhile on Twitter

• About the end by Massa Humberto.
• A little tutorial by Steve Dondley.
• Haunted by mess by Mugwump.
• Why did Parrot flounder? by Michael McThrow.
• Raku, with Python and R by JJ Merelo.
• Would be nice by Olaf Aalders.
• Stuck indefinitely? by Weekend Programmer.
• Postmodernism, futurism and Raku by The Raku Conference.
• An API to soccer by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• Interesting correlations by JJ Merelo.
• Waiting for an hour by JJ Merelo.
• It’s really odd by Bijan Parsia.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Confused after consuming hashish by rir.
• Using fez by Richard Hainsworth.

Comments about Raku

• On superpowers by Mark Devine.
• Failed at both by dragonwriter.
• Just a rename? by TylerH.
• On the new COERCE protocol by Matthew Stuckwisch.
• Does not go to waste by Stefan Seifert.
• How is the Rakudo AST branch doing on the tests? by jed-mindloom.
• On a multi-decade experiment by Ralph Mellor.
• No knowledge of Raku by NetWallah.
• Rubs the wrong way by shagie.
• Finally woke up by orev.
• Playing with .uniparse by Sebastian Dorey.
• Have you explored Raku? by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Text::Plot “A package for textual (terminal) plots” by Anton Antonov.
• FeiShuBot “Custom bot for feishu” by ohmycloud.
• APISports::Football “A Raku module for interfacing with API Sports Football” by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• Data::UkraineWar::MoD “Scrape and analyze Ukraine Ministry of Defense Data” by JJ Merelo.
• snip “Provide functionality similar to Haskell’s span” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• UK::Sort “Sorts by Ukrainian alphabet” by Andrij Mizyk.

Updated Raku Modules

• PDF::Class, PDF::Font::Loader, HarfBuzz, HarfBuzz::Font::FreeType, Cairo, HTML::Canvas::To::PDF, Text::FriBidi, PDF::Tags by David Warring.
• Ecosystem::Archive::Update, Rakudo::CORE::META, App::Raku::Log, highlighter, App::Rak, Files::Containing, paths by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Tree::Binary by Simon Proctor.
• App::Cal by Will Coleda.
• RakuConfig, Pod::From::Cache, Raku::Pod::Render by Richard Hainsworth.
• Log::Dispatch, JSON::Unmarshal by Vadim Belman.
• BinaryHeap by Peter du Marchie van Voorthuysen.
• Tomtit by Alexey Melezhik.
• PublicSuffix by JJ Atria.

Winding down

Wow, yet another nice crop of new modules! Keep them coming 🙂

This week’s image was made enjoying a small bike ride in the neighborhood. It is there to remind us to support Ukraine in their fight against the Russian aggression. Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

In the mean time, please stay safe, stay healthy, keep up the good work! ‘Rona is most definitely not over yet.

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