Ahmad M. Zawawi has completed the first version of Perl 6 language support for the Atom IDE, based on an App::Perl6LangServer module that can be used by any editor / IDE that supports the Microsoft AppServer architecture. If you’re a fan of the Atom editor / Atom IDE, this will make it a lot easier to work with Perl 6 in it. So now Perl 6 doesn’t have one IDE, but two (the other one being the Comma IDE of course).

Perl[56] on the 35c3

Daniel Böhmer is trying to get a Perl Assembly together for the 35th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, Germany. So if you would like to hang out together with other Perl people at the CCC, contact Daniel to make this happen! (FaceBook comments).

6.d review completed

Zoffix Znet has completed his pre-release review of 6.d spec (Twitter comments 1, 2). A truly impressive piece of work at almost 3500 commits reviewed and more than 400 corrections and improvements. Kudos!

JIT Grant Proposal

Bart Wiegmans has submitted a Perl Foundation grant request titled: MoarVM JIT Compiler Expression Backend Maturation. Focus of this grant will be on JITting floating point operations, improving generated code quality and improved handling of “irregular” instructions such as div . Comments as always welcome! (Reddit and grant comments).

Stupid Numeric Ticks

scruss got a little bit carried away trying to do as much as possible with Unicode numbers in a blog post titled: 𒐳 / ༳ == ( ⑽ – 𐹭 ) * ( 𒐲 / 𐅉 ), of course. Why does one do this? Well, because one can! In any case, a nice example of the flexibility of Perl 6 (Hacker News, Reddit comments).

Markatu – a lightweight markup language

Brian Duggan dove into the world of markup languages by creating a markup language called Markatu, inspired by markdown’s brevity and slim’s flexibility. In the article he describes the (Perl 6) techniques he used to create this markup language, and also lists the source that he created to render the HTML of the article (Twitter, Reddit comments).

OSCON 2018

Jim Brandt reports on the Perl booth at OSCON in Portland, OR this year. Caution: contains explicit pictures of swag.

No Perl DevRoom at FOSDEM 2019

The organizers of the Perl DevRoom at FOSDEM have been told that there will not be a Perl DevRoom at the coming FOSDEM. This is a big disappointment, but in the view of the number of groups wanting to have a DevRoom (about 140) and the number of rooms available (about 30), Perl has had a good run in the past years (FaceBook comments).

Core Developments

Ticket status of past week.

Bart Wiegmans fixed several small JIT issues.

fixed several small JIT issues. Tzu-Li Chen performed a lot of code cleanup in NQP for the Java backend.

performed a lot of code cleanup in NQP for the Java backend. Paweł Murias continued his work on integrating the three backends of Rakudo Perl 6 even better, specifically in the area of native integers and makefiles. He also fixed the REPL on the Javascript backend and removed the undocumented and not correctly functioning --encoding command line parameter.

continued his work on integrating the three backends of Rakudo Perl 6 even better, specifically in the area of native integers and makefiles. He also fixed the on the Javascript backend and removed the undocumented and not correctly functioning command line parameter. Valentin Anger fixed several problems introduced during the scalar refactor.

fixed several problems introduced during the scalar refactor. Elizabeth Mattijsen refactored the handling of MAIN subroutines, allowing for better pluggability. She also documented these new features in a separate Command Line Interface documentation page, and added tests for all these new (and old) features.

refactored the handling of subroutines, allowing for better pluggability. She also documented these new features in a separate Command Line Interface documentation page, and added tests for all these new (and old) features. Tom Browder added a lot of notes and hints on the use of NQP.

added a lot of notes and hints on the use of NQP. And some smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Perl 6

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on FaceBook

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Perl 6 in comments

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

Math::FFT::Libfftw3 by Fernando Santagata .

. App::Perl6LangServer by Ahmad M. Zawawi.

Updated Modules:

File::Zip by Patrick Spek .

. Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Build, Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Cordova, Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Angular::Build by Alexey Melezhik .

. Algorithm::AhoCorasick by Titsuki Toyota .

. App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji .

. App::Tasks by Joelle Maslak .

. POFile by Jonathan Worthington.

Winding Down

A busy week again, with some sad news with regards to FOSDEM. But please don’t cancel your travel plans to Brussels because of that: one could also see this as an opportunity to spread knowledge about Perl to other tracks. So if you see an opportunity of submitting a presentation about Perl (be it Perl 5 or Perl 6), please do take that opportunity to get out of the echo chamber! And on that note yours truly wishes everybody a good week. Until next week, for more Perl 6 news!