Mattiadg asked a question on /r/rakulang, basically: “is there a significant difference between Python and Raku” in a post called “Starting Raku for python developer“. This got quite a few (instructive) comments, and led to fixing an issue on the “at a Glance” book page.

Anton’s Corner

Anton Antonov started a poll about the focus and title of a book they intend on writing: Graph Algorithms Raku book flavors. Please let your vote be known!

Arne’s Corner

Arne Sommer, apart from basically always writing a blog post for the Weekly Challenge, has finally found the time to finish the “The Nine Billion Names of God with Raku” blog post. Not quite 15000 years, but still :-).

Dr. Raku’s Corner

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

• Raku Regex Password Checker Mini Project

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #281 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• When guarding conc or type and type is known, guard just conc/type
• Return pre-made empty string constant from latin1 and ascii
• Replace MVMROOT(... {...}); with MVMROOT(...) {...}
• Fix precomp build

Core Developments

• Elizabeth Mattijsen made sure that contributions to the documentation web site will also be reflected in the list of contributors to a release.
• Daniel Green completed the work on optimizing short strings in MoarVM (originally started by Timo Paulssen and Bart Wiegmans), resulting in about a 2% speed improvement in compilation of Raku code, as well as needing less memory. Runtime effects are as yet unknown, but could be substantial in some workflows that use a lot of small (8 characters or less) strings.
• Timo Paulssen fixed a thinko in MoarVM, which caused some debugging infrastructure to always be included, instead of only when a particular flag was set.
• H.Merijn Brand (author of Text::CSV)’s performance canary has gone down from 0.434s to 0.395s in the past 3 weeks. That’s an almost 10% performance improvement! Of course, YMMV.

In RakuAST developments this week:

• Stefan Seifert returned to RakuAST development and completed the work on the branch that took a new approach to compile time actions (really a GBR aka Great BEGIN Refactor). A branch that was started by Jonathan Worthington over a year ago. Stefan continued from there by fixing use fatal.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed an issue in deparsing with highlighting enabled.
• The number of passing test-files with the new Raku grammar are now 146/155 (make test +2) and 1069/1356 (make spectest +4).

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Still not very good, but… by VZ.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Problem using precompiled Physics::Measure objects by Kevin Pye.

Questions about Raku

• How to do a multiple dispatch (or an alternative) for a single pair? by Dmitry Matveyev.
• How to override default content type in Cro::HTTP::Client? by VZ..

Comments

• On Import/Export by Ralph Mellor.
• On the use of => by fanf.

New Raku Modules

• Statistics::Distributions “Statistical distributions and related random variates generations” by Anton Antonov.
• Needle::Compile “Compile a search needle specification” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Raku Modules

• Data::Generators, Text::Plot, JavaScript::D3, DSL::Shared by Anton Antonov.
• PDF::Native, PDF, PDF::Content, PDF::Class, PDF::Font::Loader by David Warring.
• PublicSuffix by JJ Atria.
• YAMLScript by Ingy döt Net.
• JSON::Fast::Hyper, App::Rak by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Debugging::Tool by Luc St-Louis.

Winding down

Note that the “De” in the title, is meant in the “from” meaning. Cool stuff on MoarVM and RakuAST. And again some interesting new modules. An interesting week! 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!