A bit of a scare just before the 2024.06 release of Rakudo caused some further investigation into the expression JIT logic in MoarVM on Intel processors. It was followed by the realization that the expression JIT apparently has a detrimental effect on execution (most likely introduced around the time that the new dispatch mechanism was introduced).

This resulted in the decision to switch off the expression JIT by default in the 2024.07 release. Which appears to make execution on Intel processors between 5% to 10% faster.

Yours truly hereby would like to thank Bart Wiegmans for all of their work on the expression JIT in the past. Hopefully that work can be recovered in the future.

Unreviewed Content

zzeebass alerted us to the fact that the Rakulang Subreddit is not viewable on mobile devices in a browser. Apparently this has been like this for at least 2 years, judging by some problem reports. This appears unfixable by moderators.

It should be noted that for the past year or so yours truly has been posting articles to both /r/rakulang as well as its Fediverse counterpart programming.dev/c/rakulang. Which is viewable on mobile devices.

Dr. Raku’s Corner

Dr Raku‘s beginner tutorial videos of the past week:

• Add String To File Using Prompt
• Open Read Files Using Slurp & User Input
• Given When Flow Control

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #278 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Document IO::Socket::recv(:bin) caveat
• Partially fix mixed bin/no bin reads in IO::Socket

Core Developments

• Daniel Green updated the version of the mimalloc library, and changed the check for the MVM_JIT_EXPR_DISABLE environment variable to MVM_JIT_EXPR_ENABLE, effectively disabling the expression JIT logic by default in MoarVM.

In RakuAST developments this week:

• Elizabeth Mattijsen further refined the functionality of the RakuAST::Deparse::Highlight module for Raku syntax highlighting, made the “HTML” rendering of syntax highlighting useful out of the box, and added “Text” syntax highlighting using ANSI color codes.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• 200 Challenges in a row! by Luca Ferrari.

Meanwhile still on Twitter 𝕏

• Pi Pi Pi Pi by Suman Khanal.

Questions about Raku

• Partial matching in a simple Raku program by user2023370.

Comments

• On list associativity by useerup.
• On data layout by Ralph Mellor.
• On mixins by Ralph Mellor.

Updated Raku Modules

• HTML::Entity::Fast by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Math::Nearest, JavaScript::Google::Charts, ML::NLPTemplateEngine, ML::FindTextualAnswer by Anton Antonov.
• Duckie by Brian Duggan.
• PDF::Native, PDF by David Warring.
• YAMLScript by Ingy döt Net.
• Sprockets by vendethiel.
• PublicSuffix by JJ Atria.
• Algorithm::KdTree by Itsuki Toyota.
• Sparky by Alexey Melezhik.

Winding down

Some nice gain on Intel processors coming up! Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

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

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