Andrew Shitov keeps on writing good blog posts, highlighting Raku Programming Language features:

• Native GUI with Raku (/r/rakulang comments)
• Raku: a language where a value can have several values at once (Part 1) (/r/ProgrammingLanguages comments)

and created new modules: CSV::Native, Prompt::Hidden and perhaps most interestingly GUI::Wings!

Anton’s Corner

Anton Antonov is looking for suggestions for Raku-centric AI Agent Skills!

Weeklies

Weekly Challenge #390 and #391 are available for your perusal.

New Problem Solving Issues

• It’s time to remove support for the JS backend
• Should we make breaking changes to the regex engine along with RakuAST?
• Deprecate Perl-style = multiple-assignment in favor of Raku-style Z= multiple-assignment.
• No way to read input from the terminal without echoing it

New Pull Requests

• #2037 – Fix unsound getlexperinvtype_o constant folding
• End the declarative prefix at a frugal quantifier
• Make !cursor_fail return self like nearby methods instead of the $!pos
• NQP – remove the Javascript backend support
• Rakudo – remove support for JS backend
• Apply :ratchet to an atom followed by sigspace whitespace
• Better error when crawling files for “use lib” or RAKULIB fails, and warn about too big dir trees

Core Developments

• Nick Logan again has been very busy:
  • Fixed several pre-compilation issues and some long standing issues with regexes in NQP and Rakudo.
  • Fixed several issues related to EVAL scoping.
  • Fixed several issues related to Parameter and Signature objects.
  • Fixed an issue with language level scoping.
  • Fixed an issue with make attaching values.
  • Fixed an issue with but and does.
  • Made routine identity checks reliable (instead of dependent on garbage collection).
  • Fixed an issue with character escaping in Str.raku related to various Unicode shenanigans.
  • Fixed an issue with deserialization of method tables.
  • And again many fixes, improvements and optimizations in RakuAST.
• Elizabeth Mattijsen streamlined setting of core’s dynamic variables a bit in an effort to reduce bare startup time.

Meanwhile on Mastodon

• Setting the name of a running Raku process by Moray.
• Not thinking it’s a Raku event by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Meanwhile on the mailing list

• git clone works, but then git pull doesn’t by Joseph Brenner.
• running the roast tests by Joseph Brenner.

Meanwhile on YouTube

• Reasons and Resources – Learning The Raku Programming Language

Comments about Raku

• DeepSeek/Qwen are surprisingly well at generating code for DSCI pipelines (also on programming.dev) by Alexey Melezhik.
• A bit strange by mempko.

New Raku Modules

• Sitemap “Sitemap generator” by Sasha Abbott.
• CSV::Native “CSV parsing and writing with a native fast path on Raku++, and pure Raku everywhere else” by Andrew Shitov.
• H2O::Client “Raku REST client for the open-source, distributed in-memory machine-learning platform H2O-3.” by Anton Antonov.
• Type-Relations-Digraph “Create Raku overall type map” by Richard Hainsworth.
• App::RakuDocToPDF “Provides routines to convert RakuDoc to PDF” by Tom Browder.
• Prompt::Hidden “Prompt with a :hidden adverb” by Andrew Shitov.
• Sparky::Minimal “Minimalistic sparky library used in DSCI runner” by Alexey Melezhik.
• GUI::Wings “A native GUI framework” by Andrew Shitov.
• App::FontSample “Produce PDF font specimens and comparisons from PDF::Content::FontObj objects” by Tom Browder.

Updated Raku Modules

• Syndicate, CSS::Minifier by Sasha Abbott.
• Digest::SHA256::Native, Dawa, Draku by Brian Duggan.
• LeftistHeap, LLM::Graph, LLM::Graph, Math::NumberTheory, LLM::Resources, Lingua::Stem::Portuguese by Anton Antonov.
• NotoFonts-OT by Tom Browder.
• JSON::Native, App::Rakus by Andrew Shitov.
• BSON, GnomeTools, XML::Actions by Marcel Timmerman.
• ORM::ActiveRecord by Greg Donald.
• Grammar::HTTP by Nick Logan.
• WebDriver2 by zjmarlow.
• Sparrow6, Sparrowdo by Alexey Melezhik.
• Needle::Compile by Elizabeth Mattijsen.
• jmp by Nigel Hamilton.
• Chart::Gnuplot by Itsuki Toyota.

Winding down

Wow, a lot can happen in 2 weeks!

Please keep staying safe and healthy, and keep up the good work! Even after week 86 of hopefully only 209.

Meanwhile, still: Слава Україні!  Героям слава!

If you like what I’m doing, donating to the Raku Foundation would mean a great deal to me!