This week saw a number of remarkable releases: first of all a new version of Rakudo (2023.04), which was released by Justin DeVuyst (with the binary packages for various Linux distributions by Claudio Ramirez, including for the latest Ubuntu and Fedora). This was followed up by the release of Rakudo Star 2023.04 by Anton Oks.

Earlier in the week, Jonathan Worthington released the 2023.04 version of the Comma IDE, the Integrated Development Environment for the Raku Programming Language. A time of harvesting indeed!

Hybridizing

The Raku Conference 2023 will be hybrid! To incorporate the positive aspects of online events, you can attend in person in Riga, or online from anywhere on the planet. And there is still time to submit a presentation!

And this just in: specially priced Student in-person tickets!

Fez Outage

While preparing this week’s Rakudo Weekly News, it became clear that there had not been any new modules published since Wed, 19 Apr 2023 17:34:36 GMT. After further investigation, this turned out to have been caused by a silent outage of the fez upload service. It would accept any uploaded distributions without any error message, yet failed to store or index or publish the module. This has now been corrected. But any modules uploaded in this period, sadly will have to be uploaded again.

The good news of this is that no new modules were published using the p6c or CPAN backends in this period, a clear indication that those storage systems for the Raku module ecosystem are being used less and less.

Wenzel’s Corner

Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer returns after an extended absence (welcome back!) with a blog post called Not even empty.

Clifton’s Corner

Clifton Wood has started blogging about the Raku Programming Language with a blog post called Using a Supply to Track the Number of Items in a Box (/r/rakulang comments).

Rawley’s Corner

Rawley Fowler also found time to write another blog post. This time about Functional Programming with Raku!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #214 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• A way around “multi-level classification”

New Pull Requests

• Introduce RAKU_REPL_PROMPT environment variable
• Handle uncontainerized type objects as invocant to AT-POS better

Core Developments

• Timo Paulssen fixed an LTA error message when configuring MoarVM on some Linux distributions.
• Jonathan Worthington fixed an issue with back-references in regexes.

And in RakuAST developments this week:

• Elizabeth Mattijsen continued to work on integration of the new Raku doc grammar as a slang into the new Raku grammar.
• Stefan Seifert fixed scoping issues in signatures, indirect name lookups, multi-part names, post-declaration of dynamic variables, and metaops in categoricals such as &infix:<!eqv>.
• The number of passing test-files with the new Raku grammar are now 138/150 (make test +0) and 790/1355 (make spectest +11).

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Discussing implementations of SBOM tooling by Salve J. Nilsen.
• On the opposite side of the spectrum by Mark Gardner.
• An introduction from Pune, India by Samuel Chase.

Meanwhile still on Twitter

• Twas renamed by Joaquín Ferrero.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Help with %?RESOURCES variable by David Santiago.

Questions about Raku

• Any good docs on how to use the Javascript backend? by Profoundly Nerdy.
• Using colors to increase number of brackets? by bzipitidoo.

Comments

• Most helpful by Clifton Wood.
• It was bad communication by dale_glass.
• A very powerful programming language by G3rn0ti.
• Language is ambiguous by Ralph Mellor.
• Answers by phind by poulpy123.

New Raku Modules

• YAMLStar “A cross-language, common API YAML reference framework” by Ingy Døt Net.

Updated Raku Modules

• WWW::MermaidInk by Anton Antonov.
• App::APOTD by Shimon Bollinger.
• Text::CSV by H.Merijn Brand.
• String::Utils by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Winding down

This week’s picture is is an oldie, used even before the people of Ukraine were confronted with a full frontal assault. 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!