The Call For Presentations for the Conference in Greenville, SC on June 27-29 2025 closes on 15 March. If you plan to do a presentation, make sure it is submitted before the deadline!

Foundation News

Saif Ahmed has posted an update to the Raku Ecosystem Grant Report.

Anton’s Corner

Anton Antonov published two blog posts in the past week, both based on their Graph module:

• Rock-Paper-Scissors extensions
• Military forces interactions graphs

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #312 is available for your perusal.

New Pull Requests

• Added initial revision of Slangs tutorial
• Bump mimalloc to v2.2.2
• Test and fix that Instant.from-posix-nanos and Instant.from-posix match.

Core Developments

• Daniel Green significantly reduced the number of lexical lookups by skipping frames that don’t have any.
• Timo Paulssen fixed an issue with huge hash literals hogging up much more memory than they should, and fixed an issue with type captures.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed an issue with comparing type objects with ===, an issue with memory reporting with snapper on MacOS, and re-imagined .assuming using RakuAST (making the resulting Callable between 2.5x and 50x faster).

In RakuAST developments this week:

• Stefan Seifert continued working on RakuAST. The most significant fixes:
  • BEGIN time call for non-simple constructs
  • support for %?RESOURCES and $?DISTRIBUTION
  • blocks as defaults for parameters
  • many attribute and package stub issues
  • added several warnings
  • and many smaller fixes!
• Daniel Green and Jimmy Zhuo fixed a number of warnings.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed an issue with literal values.
• The number of passing test-files with the new Raku grammar are now 141/153 (make test +0) and 1275/1345 (make spectest +31).

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Sparrowdo vs Ansible, in Russian by Alexey Melezhik.

Meanwhile on BlueSky

• Awesome! by Solomon Foster.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• Raku Study Group on 23 March by Joseph Brenner.

Questions about Raku

• Can Cro be used to create a simple website? by Profoundly Nerdy.

Comments about Raku

• Loved the grammars by harry_ord.
• Raised to the power of the swiss army chainsaw by creer.
• Top Niche Programming Languages in 2025 at BUiDTECH.
• Fairly opinionated about being fairly non-opinionated by Ralph Mellor.
• A true pleasure by Mark Devine.
• What about Sanskrit? by fuzztester.

New Raku Modules

• RakuAST::Utils “Provide basic RakuAST utilities” by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Raku Modules

• Number::More by Tom Browder.
• Air, Air::Play by Steve Roe.
• YAMLScript by Ingy döt Net.
• Dev::ContainerizedService by Jonathan Worthington.
• PublicSuffix, HTTP::Tiny by JJ Atria.
• Graph, JavaScript::D3 by Anton Antonov.
• Text::Emoji by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Date::Calendar::CopticEthiopic by Jean Forget.
• Redis by Brian Duggan.

Winding down

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after this even crazier week 7 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!