It’s the time of the decade to be looking forward! 2020 will be the first full year of the Raku Programming Language. Yours truly predicts that more people will be using Raku in the twenties than ever before! That Raku will become faster and will have quite a number of features added. Please insert your own predictions here 🙂

Renaming Progress

Building Comma on the IntelliJ Platform

Jonathan Worthington will be giving a live Webinar about how they built Comma, the Raku IDE, on the IntelliJ Platform on 16 January 2020.

FOSDEM 2020

The previously announced Raku booth at FOSDEM (1/2 February 2020 in Brussels) will become a shared Perl + Raku booth organized by The Perl Foundation and community members. Also at FOSDEM, JJ Merelo will give a 20-minute presentation: Let me tell you about Raku in the Minimalistic, Experimental and Emerging Languages track.

German Perl/Raku Workshop 2020

From 2 to 4 March 2020, there will be the German Perl/Raku Workshop 2020, this time back in Erlangen. The call for presentations is open, so please submit your Raku presentations. It looks like yours truly as well as Jonathan Worthington will be giving keynotes.

At the 36c3 Perl and Raku Assembly

Herbert Breunung reports from the Chaos Communication Congress, and on manning the Perl and Raku booth there. It appears that Camelia works! With a comment by brian d foy.

Distress

Armin Ronacher has written a blog post about Open Source migrations titled “Open Source Migrates With Emotional Distress“. It doesn’t mention Raku, but it gives some insights into the process the Raku community is going through (r/rakulang, Twitter comments).

Class, Role and Attribute Accessor

Vadim Belman has written another insightful blog post about how a specific issue with role composition and accessor generation was solved by them.

Sparrow Progress

Alexey Melezhik has been busy over the Holiday Season and reported about his work in:

They also started a discussion about how to make it easier for module authors to have their modules tested against different operating systems and Rakudo versions. If you’re a module author, this is the time to participate in that discussion!

Traceable Features

Ben Davies is working on a Trait::Traced module that would allow “tracing anything you can slap a trait on”. They’re inviting comments / suggestions, so please do mention it if you have an idea!

BASIC assembler

Mark Carter has blogged about converting a simple BASIC in ARM assembly. Still only a proof of concept, an interesting approach to creating an executable from Raku!

Weekly Challenge

A New Year’s Message from the Weekly Challenge Team. And two weeks of challenges to catch up to! Here are the Raku entries for Challenge #40:

And the weekly champion was Noud Aldenhoven.

Here are the Raku entries for Challenge #41:

Challenge #42 is up for your perusal! And so is Mohammad S Anwar‘s Annual Report!

Core Developments

Stefan Seifert fixed a lot of very complicated and obscure issues on the MoarVM backend, most of them related to the NativeCall interface in precompiled modules.

of very complicated and obscure issues on the MoarVM backend, most of them related to the interface in precompiled modules. Vittore F. Scolari fixed an issue with unsyncable files on MacOS.

Daniel Green fixed the scope of some variable declarations in MoarVM.

Elizabeth Mattijsen changed all references to perl methods to raku , and made the Mu.perl the fallback catcher (rather than Mu.raku ), and also renamed some other internals accordingly. And made the following features faster: lazy gather (15%), emit (30%), take (20%), Str.raku (1.5x to 100x), Mu.raku (40%), Pair.raku (15%).

methods to , and made the the fallback catcher (rather than ), and also renamed some other internals accordingly. And made the following features faster: (15%), (30%), (20%), (1.5x to 100x), (40%), (15%). Christian Bartolomäus fixed buffered input from a TTY on the JVM backend, which unbroke the REPL . They also fixed a bug in find_method_qualified on the JVM backend.

. They also fixed a bug in on the JVM backend. Vadim Belman fixed smartmatching of Array[Str:D] ~~ Positional[Str:D] and fixed an issue with a method in a role overriding a public attribute in a class consuming that role.

and fixed an issue with a method in a role overriding a public attribute in a class consuming that role. Rod Taylor fixed a typo in an important link of the README and allowed DateTime to accept picosecond values.

to accept picosecond values. And many smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Raku

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on Facebook

If you’re interested in developments there, go the Perl 6 group homepage.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Comments about Raku

New Raku Modules

CSS by David Warring.

Algorithm::HierarchicalPAM by Itsuki Toyota.

Homoglypher by Pawel Pabian.

Updated Raku Modules

App::Mi6, Chart::Gnuplot by Itsuki Toyota.

Math::Libgsl by Fernando Santagata.

Kind by Ben Davies.

Map::Ordered by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Sparrow6, Sparrowdo::Chef::Client, Sparrowdo by Alexey Melezhik.

Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gtk3, Auth::SCRAM by Marcel Timmerman.

WebService::AWS::S3 by Brian Duggan.

IO::Glob by Sterling Hanenkamp.

Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.

Time::Repeat by Arne Sommer.

AttrX::Mooish by Vadim Belman.

URL by Patrick Spek.

Cro::TLS, Cro::HTTP, Cro::WebSocket by Jonathan Worthington.

Winding down

A good start of a new decade (yours truly adheres to the 0-index definition)! Yours truly hoped that skipping a week would not mean twice the work to make the next Weekly. It did. Ah well, it’s all a sign of a healthy community working on a unique project. About which more news next week!