Coming to you while yours truly is enjoying some of the Burren, the Cliffs of Moher and Ireland in general: it’s good to meet up with old friends in Kilfenora.

A Glimpse Of The Future

Bart Wiegmans got inspired by one of Ovid‘s benchmarks to write a blog called “A Curious Benchmark“. Short-term it shows that all of the optimization work that Jonathan Worthington and Timo Paulssen have done over the past weeks (which will be merged after the 2018.08 Rakudo Compiler Release) already made that benchmark about 3x as fast in Perl 6. But maybe even more interestingly, the blog post shows the potential of Perl 6 becoming about 10x as fast than Perl 5 (for this particular benchmark at least) and being only 30% slower than compiled C code (Reddit comments).

Cro Middleware Tweak

Jonathan Worthington is inviting comments on a proposal to rework the functionality of before and after in Cro middleware.

Upcoming Conferences

Early September will see two Perl conferences, which are sadly overlapping: the Nordic Perl Workshop and Mojoconf and the Swiss Perl Workshop. Both will have some Perl 6 related presentations:

Doomed to Extinction

A poorly informed blog post by Nick Kowalski titled 5 Programming Languages Doomed to Extinction mentioned Perl 5 and Perl 6 as one of them. This spurred quite a lot of comments on Reddit.

LinkedIn Languages Index

Francesco Nidito took a fresh approach on trying to figure out the popularity of programming languages. An interesting approach that did not lump together Perl 5 and Perl 6 for a change. Yours truly must disagree with one of the points, though. Since I find Perl 6 being used by more and more people I do not know, the following statement appears to be in error:

«Perl 6» is the only language that permits you to know easily all the community 😊

How many between “AAA”..”ABS”?

Jo Christian Oterhals wrote a blog post about an intriguing difference between Perl 5 and Perl 6: Perl 6 small stuff #7. Your truly initially assumed a bug, fixed it then unfixed it after TimToady showed that the behaviour is intentional (although not tested for and not documented). To be continued…

Free all the butterflies

Nigel Hamilton re-kindled the naming debate with A plan for Perl’s branding – let’s free all the butterflies with quite a few Reddit comments.

The Perl Conference in Glasgow

Patrick Spek has written a nice blog post about his experiences at the Perl Conference in Glasgow (Reddit comments).

Core Developments

Trying to summarize core developments for 1 week has become more and more problematic. Doing 3 weeks, it feels nearly impossible to do justice to all the work many people have done. So if your work is not mentioned here, please take that as shoddy work by yours truly, rather than anything else.

Ticket status of the past 3 weeks.

Jonathan Worthington made the spesh thread more responsive by adding GC-points to the optimization process. He also made logging of code inlining settable with an environment variable, fixed a long-standing race condition with the setting of the name of newly generated types, and did a lot of work on providing more information for the code optimization logic to use.

made the spesh thread more responsive by adding GC-points to the optimization process. He also made logging of code inlining settable with an environment variable, fixed a long-standing race condition with the setting of the name of newly generated types, and did a lot of work on providing more information for the code optimization logic to use. Alexius Korzinek fixed several issues when encoding buffers.

fixed several issues when encoding buffers. Timo Paulssen optimized fast loops just a little bit further.

optimized fast loops just a little bit further. Stefan Seifert fixed an issue with JIT compilation related to Inline::Perl5 and a segfault related to NativeCall .

fixed an issue with JIT compilation related to and a segfault related to . Samantha McVey fixed an issue with Unicode Regional Indicators.

fixed an issue with Unicode Regional Indicators. Jeremy Studer fixed a pesky Travis testing issue on MacOS.

fixed a pesky Travis testing issue on MacOS. Zoffix Znet micro optimized some post-increments into ever-so-slightly smaller/faster pre-increments where possible in NQP .

micro optimized some post-increments into ever-so-slightly smaller/faster pre-increments where possible in . Elizabeth Mattijsen optimized interpolation of variables / expressions into double quoted strings. And she did several large-scale refactors to create better optimizable Perl 6 code in the setting.

optimized interpolation of variables / expressions into double quoted strings. And she did several large-scale refactors to create better optimizable Perl 6 code in the setting. Rob Hoelz and Nick Logan fixed an issue with mixed slashes / backslashes on Windows in the CompUnit::RepositoryRegistry .

and fixed an issue with mixed slashes / backslashes on Windows in the . And many, many, many other fixes, (efficiency) improvements and other goodies.

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on FaceBook

TPCiG Pictures by Chris Jack.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

Meanwhile on PerlMonks

Perl 6 in comments

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

Git::Log by Samantha McVey.

Updated Modules:

AttrX::Mooish by Vadim Belman .

. Trait::Env by Simon Proctor .

. Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Cordova by Aleksei Melezhik .

. Template::Anti by Sterling Hanenkamp .

. Term::Choose, Term::Choose::Util, Term::TablePrint by Matthäus Kiem .

. App::Assixt, Dist::Helper, Config by Patrick Spek.

Winding Down

The past weeks went by much more quickly than yours truly ever imagined. But on my toes, I will need to be! Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev found mention of twimbot, that is much like our notable6 bot, but with a twist:

…it either assists the author by making it easier to produce the blog post you’re reading, or it coldly replaces the author…

Hopefully it will not get to that point!. Please check in again next week to see whether yours truly really still is writing the Perl 6 Weekly!