Steve Roe was inspired by a fascinating discussion on the #raku-beginner IRC channel about the concept of the maximum and minimum possible values of empty lists, and why the Raku Programming Language handles them the way they are handled. The result was a blog post called “raku to the .max” with some insightful comments on /r/rakulang as well.

Wenzel’s Corner

Wenzel P.P. Peppmeyer was on a roll this week with two blog posts:

• Plucking strings (/r/rakulang comments)
• Most trusting

Haytham’s Corner

Haytham Elganiny posted an update on the status of the Pakku package handler for the Raku Programming Language.

Anton’s Corner

Anton Antonov published a new module WWW::PaLM and wrote a blog post with an introduction: WWW::PaLM (for Bard and other hallucinators) (/r/rakulang comments).

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #218 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• Trailing declarator docs semantics need to be revisited

Core Developments

• Jan-Olof Hendig updated libuv to version 1.45.0 on MoarVM.
• Will Coleda changed the default branch on MoarVM from “master” to “main”.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen made it possible to do die Nil and make the Nil actually occur as the payload (as opposed to Any). They also gave subsets an .^mro method, and allowed (legacy) Pod renderers to distinguish between =code, =input and =output.

RakuAST developments this week:

• Elizabeth Mattijsen was on a roll:
  • added a RakuAST::Node.literalize method (attempt to make a literal constant out of an AST)
  • added a RakuAST::Node.rakudoc method (which converts an AST to a list of RakuAST::Doc objects)
  • fixed several issues with rakudoc parsing, config handling and pod generation
  • added support for only subs and hash constants
  • added compile time type checking for scalar initializers
• The number of passing test-files with the new Raku grammar are now 140/150 (make test +2) and 825/1355 (make spectest +11).

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Replace the bottom line by Kang-min Liu.
• One begat the other by Mark Gardner.
• How could I not? by Joelle Maslak.

Meanwhile still on Twitter

• Worked for me by Mark L Devine.

Questions about Raku

• Why the pointy block with Match in for loop output Nil? by ohmycloudy.

Comments

• Wasnt’t it rebranded? by Jorengarenar.
• Raku programming: WTF?! at The Wibble.

New Raku Modules

• Mailgun “A very incomplete mailgun module” by Tony O’Dell.
• WWW::PaLM “package for connecting with PaLM (Pathways Language Model)” by Anton Antonov.

Updated Raku Modules

• Humming-Bird by Rawley Fowler.
• Term::Choose by Matthäus Kiem.
• PDF::Grammar, PDF by David Warring.
• Email::MIME by Rod Taylor.
• Protocol::Postgres, SQL::Abstract, Net::Postgres by Leon Timmermans.
• Grammar::TokenProcessing, DSL::Shared by Anton Antonov.
• File-TreeBuilder by Luc St-Louis.
• Test::Async by Vadim Belman.
• FontFactory::Type1 by Tom Browder.
• Terminal::Widgets by Geoffrey Broadwell.
• Template::Nest::Fast by Andinus.

Winding down

Keep Ukraine on your mind! 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!