Search engine DuckDuckGo has donated $25.000 to the Foundation, it being one of the organizations that share DuckDuckGo’s vision of raising the standard of trust online (HackerNews comments). A welcome addition to the foundation’s treasury! Should you (or your organization) be interested in donating, you should check out the prospectus!

Comma

The community supported plugin-version of Comma (the Raku IDE) has reached the first beta-release, thanks to the work of John Haltiwanger. User response has been very positive! Note that this community supported plugin provides all of the Comma features, including the ones that were previously only available in the paid version.

Adventing

As to was to be expected, 7 new blog posts in the 2024 Raku Advent Calendar the past week:

• Day 3 – Merry Cromas by Steve Roe.
• Day 4 – Don’t use Forsyth-Edwards Notation to play chess with LLMs by Anton Antonov.
• Day 5 – Generating an HTML Dashboard With Vanilla Raku by Coleman McFarland.
• Day 6 – Creating a presentation hosted on a Gemini capsule by Samuel Chase.
• Day 7 – Conditionally Writeable Attributes by landyacht.
• Day 8 – Yet More Abilities for Iterables by Mustafa Aydın.
• Day 9 – The end of the year by Marcel Timmerman.

Anton’s Corner

Apart from writing an advent blog post, Anton Antonov also wrote another blog post about neat graph examples in Raku as well as created a video about chess positions and knight’s tours via graphs (in Raku)!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #299 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• Revamping wrapper scripts in CURI
• Design a command language for interactive commandline / TUI rakudo-moarvm debugger

New Pull Requests

• Move test file that dies on JVM to t/09-moar
• Fix type when binding attribute for RealPolymod
• Provide adverbial forms of map
• [JVM] Reduce backend-specific code in find_best_dispatchee
• Add VM.ownup to produce backtraces of all threads and exit
• Add “no-remote-debugging” module
• New script wrappers

Core Developments

• Daniel Green created a faster path for comparisons of 8-bit (ASCII) strings on MoarVM.
• Timo Paulssen added an “is-debugserver-running” syscall on MoarVM, fixed a crash while stepping in the debug-server, prevented unneeded full deoptimizations when parsing Raku code, and fixed an issue with nativecallcast.
• Justin DeVuyst updated the release guides and worked with Will Coleda and Patrick Böker towards a 2024.12 compiler release.
• Christian Bartolomäus again fixed some issues on the JVM backend, and an issue in the optimizer.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen looked at outstanding issues:
  • Fixed self-referential QuantHashes infinilooping on .Str / .gist / .raku
  • Fixed self-referential Hashes infinilooping on .Str
  • Made slices of which the indices are out of range throw any Failures
  • Made $*USER / $*GROUP produce sensible values on Windows (as much as possible)
  • Started working on various .trans method issues, with efficiency improvements of 5% to 300% for some use-cases so far.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• All problems are one liners by Humberto Massa.
• Known about it for a long time by Daniel ⏚.
• My scripts for AoC by seaker.
• Making it super easy by Humberto Massa.
• Math::Matrix made it easy by Humberto Massa.
• Again, unsurprisingly few lines by Humberto Massa.
• Glad to be back! by Samuel Chase.
• Puzzle is fun, code is slow by seaker.
• Faster than splice by seaker.
• Complex numbers as Set keys by seaker.
• Ten lines shorter by seaker.
• Fun not optimized by seaker.

Questions about Raku

• Infix operator can’t be used from module? by ralfmuschall.
• Built-in structures for 2D arrays? by Mirek Długosz.
• What’s the most idiomatic way to extract the substring between the sentienal values? by Profoundly Nerdy.
• How do I install the Raku Cro web framework using a dockerfile by Seamus Brady.

Comments about Raku

• Gotten to first base! by Ralph Mellor.
• Interesting approaches by singe.
• Surprised to find by Hunter Anderson.
• Catching up on Advent of Code by joed.
• Fallen down the rabbit hole by Scimon Proctor.
• Looks like fun by UserNotAvailable.
• A separate advent calendar by EditorDavid.
• Levels of crime by benl.
• Not a big bang by chubot.

New Raku Modules

• App::Stouch “Simple templated file creator” by Samuel Young.
• Slang::Comments “Use comments to provide diagnostics for a Raku program” by Brian Duggan.

Updated Raku Modules

• Graphviz::DOT::Chessboard, WWW::Gemini, ML::NLPTemplateEngine by Anton Antonov.
• YAMLScript by Ingy döt Net.
• Test::When, Test::Stream, Test::Notice, Terminal::Width, Commands, PrettyDump, Map::Match, Ecosystem, App::Ecosystems, String::Utils, Prompt, App::MoarVM::Debug by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• PDF::Content, Font::FreeType, PDF::Font::Loader, PDF::Content by David Warring.
• FEN::Grammar by Dan Vu.
• Terminal::ANSI by Brian Duggan.

Winding down

So much to read and catch up on! Good stuff. Truly a Holiday Season! 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!