Brian Duggan will be presenting “Connecting the Geospatial Dots with Raku” at FOSDEM 2025: “This talk explores Raku’s expressive and powerful style as we mesh together…with some of Raku’s unique features such as NativeCall for native libraries, Grammars for parsing, multiple modes of interacting with command line tooling, and plentiful concurrency models”. Looking forward to it already!

Adventing

The 7 new blog posts in the 2024 Raku Advent Calendar the past week:

• Day 17 – Chebyshev Polynomials and Fitting Workflows by Anton Antonov.
• Day 18 – Happy™ Xmas by Steve Roe.
• Day 19 – Wrapping Scripts by Patrick Böker.
• Day 20 – Re-introducing a Raku plugin for IntelliJ IDEA by John Haltiwanger.
• Day 21 – Dam Mega Christmas by Steve Roe.
• Day 22 – Wrapping a Christmas Present by Richard Hainsworth.
• Day 23 – Santa’s Print Shop by Tom Browder.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #301 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• Multicast bikeshedding
• Feature Request: Allow state-declared variables to be instantiated/initialized to non-zero signed integers

New Pull Requests

• Preliminary multicast support
• Explicitly deactivate repl-mode for -e
• Make mult-arg grep slip its arguments
• Address proc issues caused by repl-mode

Core Developments

• Patrick Böker updated several CI runners to more recent OS versions.
• John Haltiwanger continued working on repl-mode semantics.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen added proper support for multi-needle .split if at least one of the needles was a regex, and finished the re-imagination of the .trans method (which fixed several issues and made use of .trans, tr/// and TR/// up to 3x as fast).

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Not complex either by seaker.
• Built! by Peter Kotrčka.
• Examples help a lot by seaker.
• Introducing Dormitory by Alexey Melezhik.

Questions about Raku

• Copy some hash elements to another hash by Richard Hainsworth.

Comments about Raku

• Enjoyable to learn by dartos.
• Don’t want to know anything by stakhanov.
• A similar design by andyc.
• I’m in the Advent calendar! by Hillel Wayne.
• May look like Greek by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• Cromponent “A way to create web components with cro templates” by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.
• WebService::Nominatim “Interface to the Nominatim geocoding service” by Brian Duggan.
• PDF::NameTags “Create name tags on a PDF document: eight per two-sided page” by Tom Browder.

Updated Raku Modules

• DSL::Examples, Jupyter::Chatbook by Anton Antonov.
• String::FuzzyIndex, Math::Quaternion, String::Utils, Config::INI, CLDR::List, Geo::Region, Business::CreditCard, Hash::LRU by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Font::FreeType, HarfBuzz, PDF::Font::Loader, PDF::Content by David Warring.
• YAMLScript by Inge döt Net.
• zef by Nick Logan.
• Date::Calendar::Strftime, Date::Calendar::Bahai, Date::Calendar::CopticEthiopic, Date::Calendar::FrenchRevolutionary, Date::Calendar::Gregorian, Date::Calendar::Hebrew, Date::Calendar::Hijri, Date::Calendar::Julian, Date::Calendar::MayaAztec, Date::Calendar::Persian by Jean Forget.
• Jupyter::Kernel by Brian Duggan.
• GtkLayerShell, Sway::PreviewKeys by Siavash Askari Nasr.

Winding down

Much reading again this week with the Advent blog posts. And some cool new modules! 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!