Hillel Wayne wrote an interesting article titled “Microfeatures I’d like to see in more languages“, which caused quite some comments on the interwebs, including many references to the Raku Programming Language. Check out the comments on HackerNews, /r/programming and Lobste.rs. Good to see many people out of the blue mentioning Raku!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #199 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• ENTER / LEAVE phasers interact surprisingly with signature binding

New Pull Requests

• Update to Unicode 15.0 (MoarVM)
• Bump jna lib for JVM
• Update to Unicode 15.0 (Rakudo)

Core Developments

• Stefan Seifert continued working on adding RakuAST grammar features (including fixing a pesky BEGIN / wrapping / recursive calls interaction, $_ on where blocks, many binding issues, traits on variables), increasing the number of completely passing test files: 606/1355 (+6 make spectest) and 95/134 (+12 make test).
• Daniel Green optimized some encoding cases on MoarVM.
• Leon Timmermans fixed an issue in the Raku test harness.
• Patrick Böker made building Rakudo outside of git work without as much noise.
• Vadim Belman fixed a dependency issue that would wreak havoc when bumping NQP on an existing installation.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen introduced a Cool.AST method (returns RakuAST for a given string) and $?UNICODE-VERSION in 6.e (Version object of Unicode version supported), allowed for a bare * to be used to indicate identity on classify / categorize, and continued working on RakuAST tests and deparsing.
• And many smaller fixes and tweaks in the RakuAST realm.

Questions about Raku

• Is ChatGPT hallucinating Raku syntax? by gromul79 (/r/ChatGPT comments).
• Why doesn’t IO::Socket::Async’s emit a trailing “a”? by Rawley Fowler.
• Returning multiple values? by Kay Rhodes.
• Not being able to run ALTER TABLE? by Kay Rhodes.
• Recommended method for constraining class attributes? by Steve Dondley.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Sometimes great, sometimes not by Kay Rhodes.
• DHT11 saga continues by Jonathan Stowe.
• Numeric literals, please by Tim McNamara.
• Raku support for scc by Kay Rhodes.
• Jump straight to Raku? by Osei.
• Bar graphs from the command line by Kay Rhodes.
• Fez issue on Ventura by Kay Rhodes.
• Pod editor on the front page by Kay Rhodes.
• Self-hosting SparrowCI by Alexey Melezhik.
• Bot for new modules by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• Continues to be intriguing by Osei.
• 12000th build! by Alexey Melezhik.
• Settled on a little C helper by Jonathan Stowe.
• Looks perfect by Kay Rhodes.
• Three interesting questions by Chris Done.
• Between yak shaving and shiny! by Jonathan Stowe.
• LEAVE run when not entering? by Joelle Maslak.

Meanwhile, still on Twitter

• Still in top 100 by JJ Merelo.

Meanwhile, on the mailing list

• Re: $/ not always set after a regex match? by William Michels.

Comments

• Feels like mappy or reducy by zeekar.
• Python 2 removed from Debian on HackerNews.
• Every feature imaginable by websnarf.
• Getting crowned by sigzero.
• A range of related aspects by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Grok “grok, wisp – introspection helpers” by Jeff Armstrong.
• sublist “Find where one list lies inside another” by yabobay.
• CLI::Graphing::BarChart “Produce bar graphs on the command line” by Kay Rhodes.
• UNICODE-VERSION “Provide $?UNICODE-VERSION for older Raku versions” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Lingua::Stem::Russian “Stemming Russian words with the Snowball algorithm” by Anton Antonov.

Updated Raku Modules

• TAP, Protocol::Postgres by Leon Timmermans.
• Gnome::Cairo by Marcel Timmerman.
• EC, Clifford, Digest by Lucien Grondin.
• Math::Libgsl::Matrix, Math::Libgsl::Permutation, Math::Libgsl::Combination, Math::Libgsl::Multiset, Math::Libgsl::Random, Math::Libgsl::QuasiRandom, Math::Libgsl::Histogram, Math::Libgsl::Interpolation, Math::Libgsl::Wavelet by Fernando Santagata.
• Text::Utils by Tom Browder.
• SparrowCI by Alexey Melezhik.
• fez by Tony O’Dell.
• Audio::PortAudio, RPi::Device::DHT11 by Jonathan Stowe.
• Grammar::TokenProcessing by Anton Antonov.
• ECMA262Regex by Jonathan Worthington.
• Trove by Konstantin Narkhov.
• BusyIndicator, App::Tasks by Joelle Maslak.
• LibraryMake by JJ Merelo.
• Raku::Pod::Render, Raku::Pod::Render by Richard Hainsworth.
• Humming-Bird by Rawley Fowler.

Winding down

A week very low on blog posts, but again with a lot of new modules, some by first time authors. And a lot of cool progress on core development! With freezing temperatures ahead in Ukraine, it’s good to keep the people in Ukraine in mind who are still fighting the Russian aggression. Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

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

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