The past week it became known to the Raku Community that Ben Davies (Kaiepi / @Mrofnet) passed away suddenly at home in the early hours of January 14, 2023 with his father Eric. Ben has worked on MoarVM, NQP and Rakudo since 2017. As such they worked on configuration issues, provided JIT templates and added support for asynchronous sockets in MoarVM. As well as working a lot on support of the JVM backend and optimizing Rakudo performance in general.

They will be missed. You can share a memory for his family.

Legacy: Blogs (Raku Advent), Raku Modules, Twitter, Github, Reddit, MoarVM (commits, PRs), NQP (commits, PRs), Rakudo (commits, PRs), IRC (#perl6, #perl6-dev, #raku, #raku-dev, #moarvm).

The Abstraction’s Corner

An long-time off-and-on contributor, now acting on the name “The Abstraction“, published the first of hopefully many blog posts about the Raku Programming Language: I 💗 Raku – Easy subroutine shortcuts to class constructors.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #203 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• [JVM] Add op jvmgetunicodeversion
• [DRAFT] Add RakuAST::Type::Subset
• Add Complex.sign to v6.e
• [JVM] Set Xmx4G for building Rakudo
• [JVM] Add support for $?UNICODE-VERSION

Core Developments

• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed a long-standing issue with type constraints on QuantHashes.
• Christian Bartolomäus fixed breakage with use v6.e.PREVIEW on the JVM backend.
• Márton Polgár fixed a recent regression in storing Maps.
• In RakuAST news: Stefan Seifert fixed the canonicalization of non-literal colonpair values, added support for stacking of type derivations, fixed the resolver in dynamically compiled code that was missing symbols. Elizabeth Mattijsen added a RakuAST::Nqp class for directly generating nqp ops, refactored handling of pragmas in a new RakuAST::Pragma class, and added support for Complex literals.
• The number of passing test-files with the new Raku grammar are now 128/140 (make test +3) and 665/1355 (make spectest +7).

Questions about Raku

• Give another parent class? by Kay Rhodes.
• Better way to handle misspelled named arguments for methods? by Steve Dondley.
• Why is Raku reporting “two terms in a row” when I define a new operator? by Andy Robinson.
• Why like this?? by Kay Rhodes.
• Why isn’t sign() defined for Complex numbers? by zeekar.
• Could not find List::Util by sashoalm.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Build my own by Mark Gardner.
• Sad news by The Raku Programming Language.
• Glad to have known by Claudio Ramirez.
• Back in Brussels! by Salve J. Nilsen.
• Added .all, .any methods by Kay Rhodes.
• Nothing to see here by Kay Rhodes.
• At FOSDEM by Salve J. Nilsen.
• Dinner! by Salve J. Nilsen.
• Formerly known as by Kay Rhodes.

Meanwhile, still on Twitter

• Released in 2015 by Joaquín Ferrero.
• The only emojional non-toy language by Skye Soss.
• Leaving home by Olivier Mengué.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Upcoming documentation meetings by Márton Polgár.
• lines.contains( / \h / ) returning True for input strings not containing horizontal whitespace by William Michels.

Comments

• Two ops for division by Ralph Mellor.
• On representation polymorphism by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Terminal::Graphing::BarChart “A library for generating command line bar charts” by Kay Rhodes.

Updated Raku Modules

• BusyIndicator by Joelle Maslak.
• Humming-Bird::Core, Distribution::Builder::Cmake by Rawley Fowler.
• App::termie by Brian Duggan.
• CoreHackers::Q, Net::SMTP, Data::MessagePack by Márton Polgár.
• HTTP::Tiny by JJ Atria.
• Lingua::NumericWordForms, Markdown::Grammar by Anton Antonov.
• MongoDB by Marcel Timmerman.
• LibXML by David Warring.
• zef by Nick Logan.
• Listicles by Kay Rhodes.
• Collection-Plugins by Richard Hainsworth.
• TAP by Leon Timmermans.

Winding down

A (short) week overshadowed by loss. 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!