Elizabeth Mattijsen started a series of blog posts about their REPL distribution, which in turn formed the impetus for six other distributions, each with their own unique features. The first episode is called: REPL Avalanche!

Rakudo Compiler Release

Justin DeVuyst (with help by Will Coleda) has produced the second release of the Rakudo compiler for the Raku Programming Language in 2025: 2025.02.

This release includes fixes such as allowing heredocs in the REPL, Hashes in which the order of keys is fixed, make foo.item and $(foo) always return a container, and several hyper operator related fixes.

Binary packages will become available shortly, as well as updates to Rakudo Star, if they are not already. Kudos to all involved!

Alexey’s Corner

Alexey Melezhik explained how to manage multiple ssh hosts with Sparrowdo. Furthermore, they are working on getting the Rocky Linux distribution to use Sparrowdo to check its LAMP installation.

André’s Corner

André Machado has written a nice introductory blog post about the Raku Programming Language: A Journey of Innovation and Community-Driven Expressiveness. Although yours truly can’t help but feel the blog post got a little AI help.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #310 is available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• Add a Rakupod directive for a page break
• There is no easy way to use an EXPORT sub to export a long named spaces class

New Pull Requests

• Split 5to6 section into 3 paragraphs

Core Developments

• Daniel Green provided some micro-optimizations in MoarVM, NQP and Rakudo.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen was also busy:
  • fixed multi-dimensional array slices with lazy indices in 6.e
  • Blob ~ Blobx takes the type of left-hand side in 6.e
  • fixed Associative.deepmap with regards to handling Empty
  • fixed Range.Numeric with regards to handling Inf and -Inf endpoints
  • added support for 0 in rotor
  • make grammar changes persist in the REPL (e.g. with custom operators)
  • allow for multi-line comments in the REPL
• And quite a few smaller tweaks and fixes.

In RakuAST developments this week:

• Stefan Seifert continued working on RakuAST. The most significant fixes:
  • non-trivial lazy loops
  • allow declaration of $_ in loops and other loop related fixes
  • handling labels with loop structures
  • a large number of regex related features, such as fixing LTM (Longest Token Match) matching and interpolation of attributes in regexes
  • exceptions thrown in CHECK phasers
  • support added for tr/// and TR///
  • better handling of subroutine stubs
  • and many, many more smaller fixes!
• The number of passing test-files with the new Raku grammar are now 141/153 (make test -1) and 1187/1355 (make spectest +17).

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Best of both worlds by Alexey Melezhik.
• Grouping of hosts by Alexey Melezhik.
• An APKBUILD file checker by Alexey Melezhik.
• Closer to Fabric by Alexey Melezhik.

Meanwhile on BlueSky

• Managing multiple ssh hosts by Alexey Melezhik.
• Brackets, and what they mean by Richard Kadrey.

Questions about Raku

• How to explicitly use the default value of a parameter? by fingolfin.

Comments about Raku

• So masochistic by Summer.
• 25 years of steady design and implementation work by Ralph Mellor.

New Raku Modules

• CodeUnit “Provide a unit for execution of code” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Raku Modules

• PDF::Font::Loader::HarfBuzz, PDF::Content, Font::FreeType by David Warring.
• XML by Tim Nelson.
• Sparky, Sparrowdo by Alexey Melezhik.
• REPL, Data::MessagePack, Commands, Text::Emoji, Ecosystem::Cache by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Math::NumberTheory by Anton Antonov.
• Ddt by Márton Polgár.

Winding down

Again, quite a lot of core work this week, both on old and new stuff!

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 5 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!