It’s that time of the year again: the time for writing Raku Advent Calendar blog posts! So that we can all enjoy them in the darkest days of the year (well, at least on the Northern Hemisphere). Tom Browder has opened up the 2024 list of articles to be. Please add your name and proposed article title: beginner or medium or advanced. Or tongue-in-cheek, or ultra technical. It will all be well appreciated!

London Workshop This Weekend

The London Workshop will be held this Saturday 26 October. These presentations have the Raku Programming Language (at least partly) as their subject:

• Using new RakuDoc v2 by Richard Hainsworth.
• HTML::Functional by Steve Roe.
• Coursework Design for Engineering Education by Yujia Zhai.

And if you can’t make it on the day, there’s the Pre Workshop Social on Friday evening!

Foundation News

Makoto Nozaki has published an interesting blog post about the financial situation of TPRF (/r/perl comments).

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #292 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• Raku’s Github list of popular repositories is outdated and needs a new list
• Setting Raku custom operator precedence to feed (==>)

New Pull Requests

• Update libuv to version 1.49.1
• Add telemetry log output to more pieces of moar: queues, semaphores, async processes, compunit loading, plus syscall interface for user code
• Install gdb extension
• Make Instant.DateTime coercer take timezone into account
• Make positional parameters anonymous in candidate list
• Throw coercion failures on object hashes
• Revert “Deprecate including an ambiguous .pm module file”
• Initial stab at implementing IO::Path::readlink

Core Developments

• Timo Paulssen improved various debugging tools for MoarVM.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen allowed any Junctions in regex interpolation, added support for Unicode vulgar fractions to val(), and made the REPL transparently activate rlwrap if no other line editor is installed.
• Christian Bartolomäus fixed module loading and an issue with flattening on the JVM backend.
• And many, many smaller fixes and tweaks, and tests for many issues that could thus be closed (now at 778 open issues, down from 1312 three weeks ago).

In RakuAST developments this week:

• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed a problem with .raku and deparsing, regarding the handles and will traits.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Caught my attention by Massa Humberto.
• A snappy REPL by Renormalist.
• Good so far by Renormalist.
• Totally doable by Renormalist.
• A decade of stuff by Renormalist.

Questions about Raku

• Import JPEG images by Odd_Bench_6607.
• Unexpected flattening of arrays when initalizing an array by JJ Merelo.
• A list of example projects? by Renormalist.
• A replacement for Text::Balanced? by Renormalist.

Comments about Raku

• Deserving more attention? by shashankpritam.
• It was a flop by steve_adams_86.

Updated Raku Modules

• PDF::Content, PDF::Font::Loader by David Warring.
• Definitely by Steve Roe.
• Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.
• IUP by 0rir.
• zef by Nick Logan.
• Data::Importers, JavaScript::D3 by Anton Antonov.
• Terminal::ANSIParser, Terminal::LineEditor by Geoffrey Broadwell.

Winding down

Again a number of smaller and bigger things getting fixed. And again about 100 fewer open issues in Rakudo! 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!