Anton’s Corner

Anton Antonov develops his LLM function calling workflows (Part 4, Universal specs) and gives us the Big picture: Inversion of control is a way to characterize LLM function calling. This means the LLM invokes functions or subroutines that operate on an external system, such as a local computer, rather than within the LLM provider’s environment.

Fernando’s Corner

Fernando Correa de Oliveira muses that when I start something new in Raku with Cro, I almost always begin with a mental sketch: two or three routes, a response shape, maybe a typed segment. In the Perl world I leaned heavily on Mojolicious::Lite for that prototyping phase. In Cro—powerful and modular as it is—I missed an immediate “lite mode”: no manual wiring of server, pipeline, and router just to test a thought. Out of that friction came Crolite: a thin layer that re‑exports Cro’s routing keywords and adds a multi MAIN with quick exploration commands.

Brady’s Corner

Brady has been messing around with building an LLM agent based system that obeys a supplied code of conduct (a bit like Constitutional AI but more flexible and post training, if anyone knows that).

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #341 is available for your edification.

New Problem Solving Issues

• Consider adding Raku compiler “worry” hints when encountering syntax similar to “my Hash %h” or “my Array @arr”

New Pull Requests

• Use the TV/Netflix analogy on Supplies also on the dedicated page /type/Supply. (Plus one other small proposal) by David Schultz.
• Further simplify display by say line of is rw example in Routine.rakudoc by raiph.

Core Developments

• Zero top of register when getting uint32 class member by MasterDuke.
• Bump MoarVM to get uint JIT fix, MasterDuke++ by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• Add exit-ok to Test module by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• RakuAST – Make UNIT implicits available to dynamic code by ab5tract.
• RakuAST: Doc clarification of fix for #5855 by ab5tract.

Questions about Raku

• Trouble building from source, possibly due to GitHub throttling? by zeekar.

Meanwhile on BlueSky

• Something like f-strings or template literals or the like by Thomas Sibley.

Meanwhile on the Mailing List

• fixing a test I don’t understand in community-modules by Marc Chantreux et al.

Comments About Raku

• What is better in Raku than Python? by Anton Antonov.
• Installing Rakudo and zef on NixOS Wiki.
• Am I right in thinking the system is structurally abstracted from ethics? by raiph.
• I don’t need to reinvent Raku by Corbin.
• this is apparently the Raku syntax defined as a Raku grammar by andyc.
• This is a banner language feature of Raku by ahelwer.
• computations with Raku’s “LLM::Graph” by Anton Antonov.
• Gradual typing seems to be alive in the Raku language by bolangi.
• I see Raku has surpassed Erlang and Clojure by Steve Roe.
• Adding raku.org projects to Snyk scanning by Will Coleda.

New Raku Modules

• Cro::HTTP::RouterUtils by Fernando Correa de Oliveira
• App::samaki by Brian Duggan

Updated Raku Modules

• Hilite, Air, Air::Plugin::Hilite by Steve Roe
• File::Find, L10N::ZH by Various Artistes
• Sparky, Sparrowdo, Sparky-Job-Api by Alexey Melezhik
• LLM::Functions, WWW::Gemini, Text::Plot, Statistics::Distributions, LLM::Prompts by Anton Antonov
• Term::TablePrint, Term::Choose by kuerbis
• App::Backup by Francis Grizzly Smit

Winding down

As a reminder, last week Liz shared the FOSDEM 2026 Call for Participation next year to be held in Brussels – mark the date in your diary and be sure to speak up on the IRCchat if you support a Raku Developer Room – the deadline is short 12th October.

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 36 of hopefully only 209.

Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

~librasteve (job sharing)

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