Jonathan Worthington tweeted that they finally found the time and the voice to record the presentation they had planned for the German Perl and Raku Workshop. You can either watch the video and/or look through the slides. It basically touches on these four subjects:

Where is Rakudo now with regards to macros

Why it’s time to overhaul the Rakudo compiler frontend

The design of RakuAST, an AST for mere mortals

A tentative time-path with milestones

Yours truly is particularly excited about the concept of RakuAST, which should allow building executable code without having to resort to using EVAL, with all of its security and performance implications. Exciting times!

Reintroducing ArrayHash

Sterling Hanenkamp redesigned / refactored their ArrayHash module, which originally predated the Great List Refactor, and wrote a very interesting blog post about it.

So you have an idea for a project…

Then this round of Perl Foundation Grant Proposals is the place to be! Make sure that you write your proposal before the April 18th UTC. And if you’re without inspiration, then maybe one of the grant ideas that have been suggested, is the one for you!

The continuing story of …

Andrew Shitov continued to work on the Covid-19 Observer. The “What’s new” page of the past week shows CSV and XLS download options, per capita data, compare countries, among many other new features. And in the meantime Andrew still found time to publish part 1 of Chapter 8 of their compiler book.

RakuDist Web UI

Alexey Melezhik has written a small blog post with an update about their RakuDist project. Exciting stuff for module developers and core developers alike who need to be informed about module failures!

Comprehensive Raku Archive Index

Chloé Kekoa continued working on the CRAI project, allowing reproducible builds of all modules in the Raku ecosystem. Look for example at modules that mimic Perl behaviour.

Remembering Jeff Goff

Dave Rolsky has posted an obituary for Jeff Goff on behalf of The Perl Foundation (/r/perl comments).

David Adler, who was on the same cruise as Jeff, also wrote down his memories of Jeff.

Renaming Progress

Elizabeth Mattijsen created a Pull Request for Inline::Perl5 to change the most prominent mentions of Perl 6 to Raku.

Weekly Challenge

The Raku entries for Challenge #55:

Challenge #56 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

Ben Davies fixed an issue with the order in which header files were being included in MoarVM .

. Will Coleda continued documenting many NQP opcodes that were not or insufficiently documented.

Stefan Seifert changed the way SQLite imports data from profiles, making sure it can actually handle large profile data sets.

Patrick Böker fixed building of Rakudo on Windows for non-MoarVM backends.

Timo Paulssen made the static optimizer find more optimizable opportunities again, which appeared to have been broken since the release of 6.d.

Christian Bartolomäus found the solution to a long-standing problem with next and labeled loops.

and labeled loops. Tim Smith added support for the INPUTRC environment variable, which points to the Readline config that should be used in the REPL .

environment variable, which points to the config that should be used in the . Elizabeth Mattijsen made the conversion of Num s to Rat s about 25% faster, which affects the use of now similarly.

s to s about 25% faster, which affects the use of similarly. And a number of smaller fixes, optimisations and other improvements.

Questions about Raku

Meanwhile on Twitter

Comments about Raku

New Raku Modules

Date::Calendar::Gregorian by Jean Forget.

Gcrypt by Curt Tilmes.

Updated Raku Modules

Gnome::N, Gnome::Glib, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gdk, Gnome::Gio, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.

ArrayHash by Sterling Hanenkamp.

Net::IP, Excel::Text::Template by Tom Browder.

Data::Record by Ben Davies.

Tomty by Alexey Melezhik.

Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.

Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.

Geo::Hash by Itsuki Toyota.

Template::Classic by Chloé Kekoa.

PDF::Class by David Warring.

List::MoreUtils by Elizabeth Mattijsen

Winding down

Wow! 13 different authors uploaded a module in the Raku Programming Language in the past week. Pretty sure that’s a record! Looks like the lockdown for many is also inspirational to quite a few! For the rest, yours truly repeats: stay safe, stay healthy, stay helpful. See you again next week!