Tom Browder has proudly shown off his brand new Perl 6 vehicle tag. I guess the camel got modernized with a 6-speed automatic and air-conditioning 🙂

Welcome, Kane Valentine

Kane Valentine (also known as kawaii) has become the latest Perl 6 core developer. Looking forward to see more of his work on the Perl 6 core. As a really good start, Kane has committed to doing the next Rakudo Compiler Release!

Request for Members

The Perl Foundation Grant Committee, the people who vote on whether a grant proposal to the Perl Foundation is accepted or not, are looking for new members. Voting members review proposals every two months, including community feedback, and vote on whether to approve/fund the grant. Please leave a comment, or even better make your intent to be a Grant Committee member clear to Grant Committee chairman Will “Coke” Coleda.

Perl Conference 2019 Newsletter

The organizers of the Perl Conferences in Pittsburgh, PA (16-21 June) have published their March Newsletter, with requests to YAPC “regulars” and volunteers alike! And the fact that the early bird pricing will be available until the 15th of May! And a Golden Ticket option! Check it out!

Perl Weekly Challenge

The first Perl Weekly Challenge has been published. Check out Mohammad S Anwar‘s Perl Weekly FAQ for more information. Provided are a challenge for Beginners, and a challenge for Experts. Solutions can be given in either Perl 5 or Perl 6. Let the games begin!

London Perl Workshop Videos

The videos of the London Perl Workshop 2018 have been uploaded. The Perl 6 ones are:

Web App Testing by Simon Proctor .

. Delay or Delegate by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Too bad only the presentations in the main room were recorded, so these Perl 6 related presentations:

were sadly not recorded.

Nightly Docker builds

Tony O’Dell has set up a nightly Perl 6 build on DockerHub. A quick and cool way to be able to test your stuff on the bleeding edge of Perl 6 development!

Reverse Linear Scan Allocation

Bart Wiegmans reports on the feedback that he got on his previous blog post in a new blog post. Food for compiler builder lovers! (/r/ProgrammingLanguages, /r/Compilers comments).

Heap Snapshots

Timo Paulssen reports on his progress of the heap snapshot profiler and how a new storage format reduced the size of a series of snapshots from 1.1 Gbyte to less than 100 Mbyte. Which implies you can save snapshots for a longer period before the size of the snapshots becomes really unwieldy! Can’t wait for the next update!

What’s in an ORM

Tony O’Dell also blogged about his ORM named DB::Xoos . He shows the key features of DB::Xoos, such as flexible configuration, relational modeling made easy, convenience methods and validation. Recommended reading for people who like Perl 5’s DBIx::Class.

Colonoscopy

Arne Sommer is on a roll. In the third article of his recently started blog, he describes all the different ways the colon can be used in Perl 6 (Reddit comments).

Rakudo Star RC2 available

Some issues were found with the first Rakudo Star 2019.03 candidate, so there is now a second 2019.03 Rakudo Star candidate. Please download and check it out on as many systems you can, and report any issues you may find. Thank you!

Missing math/statistics functions

Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev started an issue about missing math / statistics functions, such as clip (or clamp ), mean , median . Comments welcome!

Core Developments

Ticket status of past week.

The hard work of Patrick Böker of the past months to make the installation of Rakudo Perl 6 relocatable (in MoarVM, NQP and Rakudo) has been merged.

of the past months to make the installation of Rakudo Perl 6 relocatable (in MoarVM, NQP and Rakudo) has been merged. Nick Logan provided many more JIT templates Pull requests, so far only two (for nqp::clone , and nqp::cpucores on the Javascript backend) have been merged.

provided many more JIT templates Pull requests, so far only two (for , and on the Javascript backend) have been merged. Timo Paulssen continued working on the heap snapshot analyzer.

continued working on the heap snapshot analyzer. Elizabeth Mattijsen implemented tests to scan for unintended leakage of identifiers into the CORE:: , SETTING:: and PROCESS:: namespaces. And she also fixed a potential segfault when iterating over SetHash , BagHash and MixHash objects (and deleting objects on the fly). And made sure the USAGE message of a script is more sane when trying to show only those candidates that already partially match.

implemented tests to scan for unintended leakage of identifiers into the , and namespaces. And she also fixed a potential segfault when iterating over , and objects (and deleting objects on the fly). And made sure the USAGE message of a script is more sane when trying to show only those candidates that already partially match. Vadim Belman fixed a pesky error in which multi-dispatch was selecting the wrong proto when run inside a BEGIN block. And provide better error messages when trying to execute operators with Real type objects, similar to Date .

fixed a pesky error in which multi-dispatch was selecting the wrong when run inside a block. And provide better error messages when trying to execute operators with type objects, similar to . And some smaller tweaks and fixes.

Questions about Perl 6

Meanwhile on Facebook

Meanwhile on perl6-users

A FatRat.base issue by Aaron Sherman .

issue by . Hash copy by Marcel Timmerman.

Meanwhile on Twitter

Perl 6 in comments

Perl 6 Modules

Cool to see the number of new modules exceeds the number of updates! New modules:

API::Perspective by Kane Valentine .

. Text::CSV::LibCSV by Tony O’Dell .

. XML::Entity::HTML by Timothy Totten .

. Intl::Fluent by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch .

. Grammar::PrettyErrors by Brian Duggan.

Updated modules:

Font::FreeType by David Warring .

. XML::XPath by Martin Barth .

. DB::Xoos by Tony O’Dell .

. Pod::Load by JJ Merelo.

Winding Down

So many cool things this week: relocatability (seen by many as a prerequisite for proper packaging), nightly Docker builds, a new core developer and releaser and more new modules than updated ones. Yours truly likes to see that very much! More about that next week!