The past week Vadim Belman has worked on bringing the RakuAST branch up-to-date with the master branch, and renaming it to “main”, and making that the default Rakudo branch from now on.

This means that the next Rakudo release will have some form of RakuAST functionality enabled. It may have felt like a small step, but this will allow developers to try out these new features already, especially for those cases where Raku source code is built programmatically to be EVALled at runtime. So in a lot of ways, this is more of a very big step towards the next Raku Programming Language level. And kudos to all who brought the rakuast branch this far!

Steering Council

The minutes of the December 12, 2022 meeting are available.

Raku Advent Calendar 2022

The past weeks entries of the fourth Raku Advent Calendar:

• Day 6: Immutable data structures and reduction in Raku by Wim Vanderbauwhede.
• Day 7: .hyper and Cro by Massa Humberto (/r/rakulang comments).
• Day 8: I’ll Let You Know Later by Jonathan Stowe.
• Day 9: Something old, something borrowed, something new, something stashed by Elizabeth Mattijsen (/r/rakulang comments)
• Day 10: SparrowCI pipelines cascades of fun by Alexey Melezhik.
• Day 11: Santa CL::AWS by Steve Roe.
• Day 12: RedFactory by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #195 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Add support for RakuAST::Origin::Match
• Add Any.decont and decont(value) sub
• Try to convert ($a, $b) = ($c, $d) into $a = $c; $b = $d
• Make use of #line directive information for compile time errors

Core Developments

• Claudio Ramirez created Linux packages of Rakudo 2022.12, also on Alpine 3.17.
• Stephan Seifert continued working on the Raku grammar, which brings the number of passing test files to 585/1355 (+18) and 83/131 (+3).
• Vadim Belman improved backtrace support in NQP, specifically for compilation error reporting.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen unbitrotted the Formatter (which contains the logic for sprintf) module, the first actual use code-building using RakuAST building blocks.

Questions about Raku

• How to correctly decontainerize the value side of a Pair object by Silvio Mayolo.
• Behavior difference with map vs hypered nonce block by zeekar.
• Article about Cro and non-HTTP services? by Jonathan Stowe.
• Looking for feedback by diktomat.
• How to pipe in a string to a Raku program? by Jim Bollinger.
• Anonymous state variables versus topic variables by Lars Malmsteen.
• How to group elements of a list in Raku? by menfon.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Second generation CLI documentation too by Kay Rhodes.
• Poor planning by Flavio Poletti.
• Snap and refactor, again by Flavio Poletti.
• Rotoring for fun by Simon Proctor.
• Counting downloads by Claudio Ramirez.
• Awaiting binaries by Alexey Melezhik.
• More TooLoo by Kay Rhodes.
• Took some time by Alexey Melezhik.
• Testing against 2022.12 by Alexey Melezhik.
• Rakudo binaries 2022.12 by Siavash Nasr.
• Best positioning by Flavio Poletti.
• Insane crane by Flavio Poletti.
• An excellent article by Jonathan Stowe.
• On immutable data structures by Wim Vanderbauwhede.
• With many tpyos by Jonathan Stowe.
• Might try it in Raku by Simon Proctor.
• Only 5 characters more by Simon Proctor.
• Too much stuff by Flavio Poletti.
• All the steps in one pipeline by Alexey Melezhik.
• Nice with a Junction by Kang-min Liu.
• A great article by Jonathan Stowe.
• With some inflection by Flavio Poletti.
• A bit of a bummer by Flavio Poletti.
• Canned diversity by Flavio Poletti.
• Cascades of fun by Jonathan Stowe.
• Rationally proper support by Hak Foo.
• Freshly clawed by The Raku Programming Language.
• No space by Flavio Poletti.
• Happy to tail by Flavio Poletti.
• Patching trees messily by Flavio Poletti.
• Red-nosed factories by The Raku Programming Language.
• Racing again by Simon Proctor.

Meanwhile, still on Twitter

• Was it a Parrot? by 結城 あゆむ.
• XOR and exponentiation by Daily Pedantry.
• Going against the grain by Roland Tepp.
• Switching to more powerful languages by Paul Graham.
• Ready for Github Actions by JJ Merelo.
• Very sad news by Jonathan Worthington.
• It’s amazing by JJ Merelo.
• A CLI to AWS by JJ Merelo.
• I forgot everything by まぐげんがー.
• Upgraded Github::Actions by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Raku opens a notepad when executing a .bat by ToddAndMargo.
• returns question by ToddAndMargo.
• Name of calling program by ToddAndMargo.

Comments about Raku

• The most advanced module system by amano-kenji.
• No mention of Raku? by DriNeo.
• You have been warned by Ralph Mellor.
• The World War on programming errors by Ralph Mellor.
• Not using == for strings by Nikko_77.

New Raku Modules

• TooLoo “Helps you document & find your utility scripts” by Kay Rhodes.
• ValuePair “Provide an immutable Pair value type” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Raku Modules

• Math::Libgsl::RandomDistribution, Math::Libgsl::Statistics, Math::Libgsl::RunningStatistics, Math::Libgsl::MovingWindow, Math::Libgsl::DigitalFiltering, Math::Libgsl::Eigensystem, Math::Libgsl::Series by Fernando Santagata.
• bird by Alexey Melezhik.
• Kind by Ben Davies.
• Data::Reshapers, Proc::ZMQed, Text::Plot by Anton Antonov.
• PDF::Tags, PDF by David Warring.
• PublicSuffix by JJ Atria.
• envy by Tony O’Dell.
• immutable by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Trove by Konstantin Narkhov.
• Unicode::Security, Dist::META, IO::Capture::Simple by JJ Merelo.
• Getopt::Long by Leon Timmermans.

Winding down

Wow, what a step forward!

This week’s picture was taken just after sunset today! It was a very cold bicycle ride, but the views were magnificent. And such beautiful views should remind us that Ukraine is still fighting the Russian aggression. Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

Please keep staying safe, keep staying healthy, and keep up the good work!

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