This week saw a lot of long awaited releases. Most important is probably the announcement of the release of the free Community Edition of Comma, a powerful, yet free, Perl 6 IDE (/r/perl/, /r/perl6 comments). And at a small subscription fee, you get even more features, such as test coverage reporting, profiling and more refactoring tools. Please feel free to try out the free version before deciding on needing more functionality!

Rakudo 2019.03 Released

Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev and Samantha McVey hung on in there and got the Rakudo Compiler Release 2019.03 out of the door. Which means the world will never see a 2019.01 or a 2019.02 release of Rakudo Perl 6. And it will give people some more time for the 2019.04 release!

Claudio Ramirez made sure there are new Linux packages for this release. And JJ Merelo, just a few days later, announced brand new Docker images. And Naoum Hankache created a release candidate for Rakudo Star 2019.03: please check it out so that this can be released to the general public soon!

JIT Grant report

Mark A Jensen reports on the progress that Bart Wiegmans is making on his MoarVM JIT Compiler Expression Backend Maturation grant. The report also hopes for advice on a register allocation conundrum that the grantee is facing.

Perl6.eu

Arne Sommer has started a new blog about Perl 6. In his first post he expands on some “what if” scenarios in which the “ $ ” sigil is replaced by either “ € “, or even “ £ “. Yours truly wonders why “ ¥ ” was left out of this research :-). The article shows some interesting attempts at making the alternate sigils work, especially about the problems encountered when subclassing the Perl 6 grammar itself (Reddit comments).

German Perl Workshop

Three days of Perl presentations in a Bavarian background. Thomas Klausner is the first to blog about it (“Perl 6 keeps getting to look cooler and cooler”). And then there are the slides of most of the Perl 6 related presentations:

And to give you a visual impression: Wendy van Dijk has started uploading many, many pictures of this German Perl Workshop.

Fukuoka Perl Workshop

Slipped by the attention of yours truly, but last weekend also saw the 28th Fukuoka Perl Workshop, with at least one Perl 6 presentation by AnaTofuZ: Inside of the Perl 6.

European PerlCon Monthly Update

Andrew Shitov has posted the update of March for developments relating to the European Perl Conference in Riga. Such as a Perl 6 presentation about Console-oriented Sites by Igor Chubin. Or the available workshops before the conference starts. Or the Send-A-Newbie program, kindly sponsored by Geekuni.

Weekly Perl 6 Challenge

Mohammad S Anwar is still looking for people willing to participate in a Weekly Perl challenge, be that in Perl 5 or Perl 6. Please drop him a line at mohammad.anwar@yahoo.com if you’re interested. And remember, you don’t have to be an expert to join the challenge!

Core Developments

Ticket status of the past week.

Many ops are now also JITted, thanks to the work of Daniel Green . He also added a smrt_intify for faster string -> integer conversions.

. He also added a for faster string -> integer conversions. Timo Paulssen continued his work on the heap profiler.

continued his work on the heap profiler. Stefan Seifert fixed a problem in the JIT of the readuint op.

fixed a problem in the JIT of the op. Paweł Murias improved the stack trace of exceptions thrown by code in an EVALFILE .

improved the stack trace of exceptions thrown by code in an . Elizabeth Mattijsen improved the .perl representation of a Parameter object, specifically if it was a constant.

improved the representation of a object, specifically if it was a constant. Nick Logan fixed some issues with the Kernel shelling out to uname to obtain certain kernel related information.

fixed some issues with the shelling out to to obtain certain kernel related information. And not a lot more on account of the releases and the German Perl Workshop.

1000+ Questions about Perl 6

The 1001st Perl 6 question on StackOverflow has been asked!

Meanwhile on Facebook

Meanwhile on perl6-users

lp0 by ToddAndMargo.

Meanwhile on Twitter

Perl 6 in comments

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

Intl::UserLanguage by Matthew ‘Matéu’ Stephen Stuckwisch .

. Net::RCON by Kane ‘kawaii’ Valentine.

Updated modules:

JSON::Name, JSON::Marshal, JSON::Class, META6, Test::META by Jonathan Stowe .

. Smack by Sterling Hanenkamp .

. TAP, App::Prove6 by Leon Timmermans .

. Bailador by Martin Barth .

. GTK::V3, GTK::Glade by Martin Timmerman .

. Test::HTTP::Server by Simon Proctor .

. Random::Choice by Itsuki Toyota .

. Concurrent::Stack by Jonathan Worthington .

. Test::Output by JJ Merelo .

. DB, DB::MySQL by Curt Tilmes.

Winding Down

Plenty of good, new and exciting things happened the past week. Conferences and workshops are always a good reason to get stuff out. Too bad that means that the work on the core suffers. Pretty sure that will pick up again in the coming week. So see you at the next Perl 6 Weekly!