Thanks to the work by Timo Paulssen and many others, it looks like the next stable release of the Debian distribution (“Trixie“) will contain a recent Rakudo release! Since Debian is used as the base for a number of other Linux distributions, this is extra good news for the Raku Programming Language in the long term!

Foundation News

Makoto Nozaki has decided to resign from the board of the foundation. On behalf of the Raku Community I would like to thank Makoto for their efforts in the past 8 years. If you want to help the foundation, you are encouraged to get in touch with them!

FOSDEM 2025

The past weekend saw FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. The video of Brian Duggan‘s “Connecting the Geospatial Dots with Raku” presentation is not yet online, but the slides are!

Alexey’s Corner

Alexey Melezhik has published 2 blogs posts in the past week:

• Validating configuration files with Raku and Sparrow Task::Check DSL
• Sparrow – whirl of generators

Elizabeth’s Corner

Elizabeth Mattijsen has published the final part (for now) in the Towards more coverage blog series: Test coverage in practice.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #307 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Do NOT require metadata license for new modules
• Standardize markdown file extension
• Reduce allocations
• Maybe optimize MVM_string_latin1_decode()
• Convert old perl6 refs to Raku
• Introduce Hash::Ordered: hashes that keep the order of the keys

Core Developments

• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed several issues with the meta-reduction operators, removed the magical handling of the single argument reduction case for left-associative operators, allowed support for reduction of hyper operators in the 0 and 1 argument case, and made Hash.clone use the same semantics as Array.clone.
• Nick Logan deprecated the IO subroutines (such as rmdir()) that take multiple paths, because their semantics are unclear.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Raku has! by Eskild Hustvedt.
• Feels less idiomatic by Profoundly Nerdy.
• Free Karma by Hunter Jozwiak.
• Some practice examples by Wendy van Dijk.
• A hundred years from now by Stéphane Bortzmeyer.
• An unknown reason by Lord Doctor Olle W.

Meanwhile on Bluesky

• Verify grub by Alexey Melezhik.
• A new release by Will Coleda.
• Negation checks by Alexey Melezhik.
• Go format plugin by Alexey Melezhik.
• Simple code search by Alexey Melezhik.
• Check mkinitcpio.conf by Alexey Melezhik.
• Parsing logrotate config by Alexey Melezhik.

Questions about Raku

• I need a Raku grammar to change itself based on a different match by sailortailorson.
• Is it ok to use binding when declaring variables? by zentrunix (auto-generated video ripoff of question and answer).
• Grammar question by Profoundly Nerdy.
• Trying to Add Actions to a Simple Grammar by s-ro_mojosa.
• Best way for Raku program to send data to C-program by BaileysHuman.
• How can I use λ (lambda) for “->” (if at all)? by ralfmuschall.
• Serializing Basic Types to XML by Clifton Wood.

Comments about Raku

• Some Raku in Welsh by Steve Roe.

New Raku Modules

• Slang::Lambda “Allow λ as a pointy block starter” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Fortune “Unix fortune database interface” by Samuel Young.

Updated Raku Modules

• App::Stouch, Pod::To::Man, File::Tudo by Samuel Young.
• WebService::Nominatim by Brian Duggan.
• Sparrow6 by Alexey Melezhik.
• LLM::Prompts, Math::NumberTheory by Anton Antonov.
• Rakuast::RakuDoc::Render by Richard Hainsworth.
• YAMLScript by Ingy döt Net.
• REPL, Code::Coverable, XML, Test::Coverage by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Winding down

This week’s picture is of an art work that was recently washed away by flooding.

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 2 of hopefully only 209.

Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

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