We already have 9 days covered by 5 authors. Don’t miss out and reserve your slot now for the festive fun at the authors.md page. All it takes to get on the schedule is to make a quick PR with your name and your proposed festive post title(s). Beginner, Intermediate or Genius level – your call. It would be great to see some RakuAST related posts and unique Raku things such as Slangs and Grammars are always a lot of fun … plus would be cool to see something about SBOM, since no one wants the festivities ruined by hackers.
Fosdem 2026 Stand Up
The powers-that-be at Fosdem have accepted our proposal for a stand, https://fosdem.org/2026/news/2025-11-16-accepted-stands/ and we are actively planning & budgeting for the event. Don’t forget to book your accommodation if you are coming and I hope that we can all mill around the stand and look like a crowd.
Raku Tips ‘n Tricks
If your conditionals are starting to look like a random pile of if/elsif checks like mine, consider the Raku given/when construct (like a C switch statement on steroids)…
my $input = "42";
given $input {
when 42 { say "The answer!" }
when /^ \d+ $/ { say "Digits only" }
when Str { say "Type is Str" }
default { say "No idea…" }
}
Here’s why it’s great:
- Readable: Logic branches are structured around a single topic ($input).
- Expressive:
whencan match values, types, or regexes. - Smart: It uses Raku’s ~~ smartmatch operator behind the scenes, so you get powerful matching behavior “for free.”
Unlike classical switch statements, you do not have to remember to use break on every line.
Your contribution is welcome, please make a gist and share via the raku channel IRC or Discord.
Weeklies
Weekly Challenge #349 is available for your discovery.
New Pull Requests
- Fix parameterizations of types in `is` trait by John Longwalker
- Add an istype check on the role group by John Longwalker
- Another vararg test: passing `Int`s by Patrick Böker
- Document parameters :$heap and $message of Telemetry::snap by David Schultz
- Instant, DateTime: discuss leap seconds per issue 3881 by Eric Forste
- Mention Lock::Async in language/concurrency by timo
- Clarification on &done and &emit by timo
- Issue 3881, type/Instant & type/DateTime by Eric Forste
- Revise description of named arrays in create-cli.rakudoc by Eric Forste
- deepmap/duckmap/nodemap, issues #4560 & #4711 by Eric Forste
Core Developments
- Minor updates to release guide by Will Coleda
- Add vararg support to NativeCall by Patrick Böker
- Remove lexical $current-offset-nanos by John Longwalker
- Adjust CLI help to mention –optimize=off by John Longwalker
- Add an istype check on the role group by John Longwalker
- RakuAST/v6.e – Fix subset type defaults in containers by John Longwalker
- Why were coercions excluded? by John Longwalker
Comments About Raku
New Raku Modules
- Color::DirColors by Geoffrey Broadwell
Updated Raku Modules
- Terminal::Widgets, Terminal::Capabilities, Terminal::Tests by Geoffrey Broadwell
- Terminal-API by Patrick Böker
- Sparky by Alexey Melezhik
- Slang::Nogil by Elizabeth Mattijsen
- LLM::DWIM, App::samaki by Brian Duggan
- Physics::Constants, App::Crag by Steve Roe
- Terminal::ANSIColor by Various Artistes
- WWW::OpenAI, Statistics::Distributions, LLM::Functions, Math::SparseMatrix by Anton Antonov
Winding down
Now, I must away and prepare for the Short Notice London Perl (and Raku) Workshop 2025™ on this coming Saturday 29th. Here are the talks, don’t miss Breaking the hegemony of English by our very own finanalyst.
Please visit https://www.londonperlworkshop.com to register to attend (free) or to propose a short talk. I hope to see you there!
Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 45 of hopefully only 209.
Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні! Героям слава!
~librasteve
Rakudo Weekly News 