Derek Banas has posted a really nice introduction of Perl 6 on YouTube (1:20h), described by him as:

This tutorial is a 400 page Perl 6 tutorial condensed down into 1 video. Perl 6 is a get it done fast utility language. I’d say it is the most popular utility language. The newest version ads a ton of tools to the original Perl.

(Twitter announcement. ryn1x, Diego S. Costa and ɥɐɹʇıɟ pɐɯɯɐɥnɯ liked it on Twitter so far. There were also some Reddit comments.

PerlCon 2019

The website for the European Perl Conference (7-9 August 2019 in Riga, Latvia, formerly known as YAPC::Europe and The Perl Conference in Riga) is now live. With information about the venue, ticket pricing and a Call for Participation. So start making your plans to just attend, or maybe even give a Perl 6 related presentation!

A new DB interface

Curt Tilmes has applied the database interface that he had written in the past for DB::Pg to two other well known databases: SQLite and MySQL. In his announcement he shows that, unlike DBIish, the new modules are thread safe. Good stuff!

Portable profiles

Alexey Melezhik shows how portable profiles with Tomtit can be used to easily automate repeating tasks. More good stuff!

About types and polymorphism

Bart Wiegmans has published a short post about what he is up to the coming weeks on the expression JIT and how support for floating point operators forces a rethink about the design of the JIT. Good stuff to come!

New CPAN notifier bot

Patrick Spek has made a new CPAN notifier bot on the #perl6 IRC channel that will notify whenever there is a new upload of a Perl 6 CPAN module. It’s been pretty busy lately 🙂

Sparrow moves to Perl 6

Alexey Melezhik also announced that the Sparrow core code and core plugins will be migrated to Perl 6 in the coming months (Reddit comments). And so it begins.

Graphs on Fire!

Timo Paulssen reports on his work on the profiler in a fiery post about icicle graphs and how you will be able to use them to target those parts of your code that are the hottest and would benefit the most from optimizing (Reddit comments). Really cool stuff.

Grant Extension

Makoto Nozaki is pleased to announce that Jonathan Worthington‘s request for a grant extension has been approved, albeit only for the first half for now due to lack of funding. Which should be a cue for everyone to donate!

Core Developments

Ticket status of past week.

Timo Paulssen fixed a name collision between MoarVM and a new version of libtommath .

fixed a name collision between MoarVM and a new version of . Jonathan Worthington added a new tool for debugging spesh guards, and solved a problem in which spesh guards were being added repeatedly when they shouldn’t. And he fixed an issue with line number annotations that would disappear in some occasions and he fixed several recently introduced issues related to the use of $_ in some situations.

added a new tool for debugging spesh guards, and solved a problem in which spesh guards were being added repeatedly when they shouldn’t. And he fixed an issue with line number annotations that would disappear in some occasions and he fixed several recently introduced issues related to the use of in some situations. Stefan Seifert fixed a race condition in the garbage collection of CStruct STables .

fixed a race condition in the garbage collection of . Elizabeth Mattijsen made the other QuantHash es also parameterizable (aka Bag / BagHash / Mix and MixHash ).

made the other es also parameterizable (aka / / and ). Paweł Murias continued his work to allow running the spectest in precompilation mode.

continued his work to allow running the spectest in precompilation mode. And many, many other smaller fixes and improvements in preparation of the 2019.01 Rakudo compiler release.

Questions about Perl 6

Meanwhile on Twitter

Perl 6 in comments

Perl Modules

New modules:

Net::NNG by Sam Gillespie .

. App::CPAN by Patrick Spek .

. DB, DB::SQLite, DB::MySQL by Curt Tilmes.

Updated modules:

Tomtit by Alexey Melezhik .

. Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert .

. MongoDB, GTK::Glade by Martin Timmerman .

. Hastebin by Ben Davies .

. OO::Plugin by Vadim Belman .

. Unix::Groups, Object::Permission, Object::Permission::Group, DoublePhone, NativeHelpers::Array, Manifesto, EuclideanRhythm, Audio::Icecast, JSON::Marshal, JSON::Name, META6, JSON::Class, Test::Util::ServerPort, MessagePack::Class, Audio::Libshout, Audio::Playlist::JSPF, Chronic, JSON::Infer, MQ::Posix, FastCGI::NativeCall::Async, Sys::Lastlog, Sys::Utmp, XDG::BaseDirectory, URI::Template, GDBM by Jonathan Stowe .

. Algorithm::LDA by Itsuki Toyota .

. Font::FreeType by David Warring .

. App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji.

Winding down

Although in many ways this felt as a quiet week, plenty of stuff is going on, on stage and behind the scenes. It’s good to see so many Perl modules get an update: the mere fact of an update of a module can make people aware of its existence. Good stuff.

That’s it for this week. Yours truly hopes she didn’t forget to mention too much stuff. See you next week!