FOSDEM Community Dinner Information

TPRF sponsor the FOSDEM Perl and Raku community dinner which is is traditionally held on the Saturday evening. All food is included and guests are free to purchase their own drinks. [Ed: guess that’s what they mean by free as in beer?]

31st January 2026 19:30

Please register to attend:

https://perlfoundation.org/fosdem/community-dinner.html

Richard’s Corner

Richard Hainsworth has produced a brand new online browser/editor for RakuDoc (v2).

https://raku.finanalyst.org/rakudoc_editor/ (the final / is important)

There are two sample rakudoc sources via the drop-down; the render test one may take some time to render.

You can upload your own RakuDoc source, and download the RakuDoc source to your download directory.

The docker image that runs this browser contains the latest version of RakuDoc (v2), which includes the enumeration functionality.

Very nice!

Liz’s Corner

This week, Elizabeth Mattijsen (lizmat) has blasted out 4 posts in her series on WHY RAKU GETS SHOUTY SOMETIMES:

• Cases of UPPER
• INIT to an END
• Hello, Goodbye
• First Next, then Last

Set phasers to stun. Stay tuned for more.

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #358 is available for your enjoyment.

Raku Tips ‘n Tricks

This week, gleaned from a recent exchange between timo, arkuiat and profoundly nerdy:

In Raku, the for keyword is the only looping construct that binds to $_ (the topic variable) each time through the loop. Unlike Perl, in Raku there is no usage of while that does this. Other keywords that also automatically bind $_ (but don’t loop) are with and given, but I’m sure there are others that I’m not coming up with with right off the top of my head.

Of course, you can always go something like:

while prompt('>> ') -> $_ { say "I say, $_"; }

Here are the keywords that do bind and use $_:

my @a = <a b c>; my $x = 42;

#for, given and with bind $_

.say for   @a;
.say given $x;
.say with  $x;  #if defined

#when reuses givens $_
given $x {
    when 42 { say $_ }  # same $_ as given
}

#whenever (Each event emitted by the Supply becomes $_)
my $s = supply { emit 1; emit 2; emit 3; done; }

react {
    whenever $s {
        say $_;  # emitted value
    }
}

If you don’t specify a target, regexes default to $_:

#regex matches m//, s///
{ say "match!" if /ell/ } given "hello";

For map, grep and sort $_ exists, but its block magic, not keyword binding:

my @a = <a b c>; 

@a.map({ .say });

Your contribution is welcome, please make a gist and share via the #raku channel on IRC or Discord.

Core Developments

Extracted from the latest Draft Changelog.

Questions About Raku

• Two level export – help needed please by Steve Roe

Comments About Raku

• Oh God, they actually put that awful logo front and center by preommr
• Draig, a Welsh Programming Language – This is neat! by benrutter
• perl community’s love of complexity, which led to the disaster that was Raku by clay_shirky

Meantime on The Socials

• hear a #RakuLang program¹ playing the Amen Break forever* by Jonathan Stowe
• MoarVM, the virtual machine that runs #rakulang, has a dynamic specializer by timo
• The language is actually supremely nice by David Schultz
• It’s my current fav language by 4zv4l
• rakulang even goes a bit further, by creating grammars by CppGuy

Updated Raku Modules

• Physics::Unit, Air by Steve Roe
• Terminal::UI, App::samaki by Brian Duggan
• Terminal::Tests, Terminal::Widgets, Terminal::Capabilities by Geoffrey Broadwell
• App::Mi6 by skaji
• LLM::RetrievalAugmentedGeneration, LLM::Graph by Anton Antonov
• List::Agnostic, Text::Emoji, MoarVM::Bytecode, MacOS::NativeLib, Array::Agnostic by Elizabeth Mattijsen

Winding down

Dear USA friends & colleagues – on a personal note, I want to be sure you know that you are loved and embraced by the Raku community (I lived for a while in Colo. Spgs and SF), and that any negative view that we hold regarding D. Trump and his entourage is not intended as a general attack on the American people.

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 52 of hopefully only 209.

Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

~librasteve