JJ Merelo has been very active for the Perl and Raku communities for many years. Organizer of the YAPC::Europe in Granada, giving many Raku presentations, working on the Raku documentation, and a regular helper at FOSDEM. The past years, also as a Raku Steering Council member and the Raku Community Affairs Team. Earlier last year, JJ indicated that the Raku activities became too much, with all the other tasks JJ was performing.

As of January 1st 2023, JJ is no longer member of the RSC or the CAT. We thank JJ for all that they’ve done for Raku, and hope that JJ will continue to stay in touch with the Raku Community.

Steve’s Corner

Steve Dondley returns to the gym and brings us a script for finding outdated extensions in Raku module distributions.

Anton’s Corner

Anton Antonov discusses the generation of random sentences using the Raku Programming Language in Grammar based random sentences generation, Part 1.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #201 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• throws-like does not work correctly a string for the exception name
• [JVM] Add some constants DISP_*
• Introduce the IGNORE phaser
• [JVM] Add support for $?UNICODE-VERSION

Core Developments

• Daniel Green fixed a non-fatal error in MoarVM’s JIT.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added many RakuAST tests (make test now at 102/139, +8), and added support for FIRST, NEXT and LAST phasers in RakuAST.
• Stefan Seifert added RakuAST support for $?CLASS and ::?CLASS (at compile time) and the INIT phaser, fixed role application and an issue with binding generics in signatures, and quite a few things more (make spectest now at 627/1355, +9).
• Christian Bartolomäus fixed an issue with typed optional @/% parameters on the JVM backend.

Questions about Raku

• Any way to easily ensure zef is pulling latest versions of raku modules? by Steve Dondley.
• Bin dir handling question by Kay Rhodes.
• Raku + Godot? GDExtension, could this be possible? by Umagoon.
• “Pathname can’t be converted from UTF-8 to current locale” warning with Libarchive::Read module by Steve Dondley.
• Installing Time:Duration by Kay Rhodes.
• Using a string as a regex? by zetaconvex.
• Raku signature (Array @r) is not (Array:D)? by FyFair.
• Comma doesn’t seem to find “Legacy extensions” for some modules by Steve Dondley.
• On the future of old packages by Kay Rhodes.
• How can I create an installable package? by Julia.
• Elegant way to write when inside a for loop? by VZ..
• How to iterate on a sigil? by Julia.
• Grepping on Nil? by reddit_clone.
• “No single root directory found, all dists must extract to a single directory” error when trying to upload module to zef via App::Mi6 by Steve Dondley.
• Algorithm with floating point error? by Curtis Poe.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• ISO-8601 literal dates by Siavash Askari Nasr.
• MacOS installation tips by Kay Rhodes.
• Faster and cheaper by Alexey Melezhik.
• Giving it a chance by Kay Rhodes.
• Happy days by Kay Rhodes.
• Created a Sparrow pipeline by Alexey Melezhik.
• Frustrating by Kay Rhodes.
• Love how it looks by Alexey Melezhik.
• On invoking strings by Julia.
• On the joys of COERCE by Jonathan Stowe.
• The 2020 booth at FOSDEM by Salve J. Nilsen.
• An interesting idea by Julia.

Meanwhile, still on Twitter

• A rational number is better by Dan Kogai.
• Another amazing tool by JJ Merelo.

Comments

• Add whatever semantics you want by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Env::Dotenv “A Raku shim to load environment variables from .env into %*ENV” by Dan Stephenson.
• Directory “An object representing a directory” by Steve Dondley.
• TimeBomb “Trait to provide forced deprecation of Raku Code” by Joelle Maslak.

Updated Raku Modules

• App::Tasks by Joelle Maslak.
• GTK::Simple, Collection-Plugin-Development, Collection, Collection-Plugins by Richard Hainsworth.
• Net::Gemini, Humming-Bird by Rawley Fowler.
• CLI::AWS::EC2-Simple by Steve Roe.
• Dawa by Brian Duggan.
• App::Rak by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• CoreHackers::Sourcery, Pastebin::Shadowcat, Pastebin::Gist, Web::Template, XML by Márton Polgár.
• SparrowCI, Sparrowdo, SparrowCI by Alexey Melezhik.
• TooLoo, Time::Duration by Kay Rhodes.
• PublicSuffix by JJ Atria.
• LibXML, PDF by David Warring.
• Clifford by Lucien Grondin.
• Archive::Libarchive, Archive::Libarchive::Raw by Fernando Santagata.
• DSL::Shared by Anton Antonov.
• Digest::HMAC by JJ Merelo.
• App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji.

Winding down

A blue monday week with a lot of new modules and module updates, and a few blog posts. But a lot of questions, many by new faces! Meanwhile, please 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!

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