Jonathan Stowe announced a long overdue migration to the Raku era of their NoiseGang portal, a group for the promotion and support of audio and music application development. Definitely a place to check out if you’re into making music using your computer!

Another Rakudo Star!

It has taken quite some time, but finally, a new Rakudo Star (2020.01) has been made available by Patrick Spek (many kudos!). This now provides a new entry point for entry-level users of Raku.

Another Rakudo Compiler Release!

Alexander Kiryuhin released the second edition of the Rakudo Compiler this year: release #134 (2020.02). However, there appears to be an issue with one of the libraries that MoarVM needs on the Alpine distribution: this is holding up the creation of Linux packages at the moment of this writing.

Rakudist Update

Alexey Melezhik shows how you can test command line applications using Tomty and Rakudist. And as always, they’re interested in feedback, ideas and comments!

New tag line?

JJ Atria came up with a very nice way of describing Raku on Twitter:

🦋 #rakulang is the language I never knew I always wanted — JJ Atria (@jjatria) February 20, 2020

which yours truly rephrased as “Raku, the language you never knew you always wanted“. Perhaps we should put this on T-shirts and stuff!

Design flaws

Ogniloud wants to know about what people think are design flaws of Raku. This created a nice thread on Reddit, and some remarks on Twitter.

Renaming Progress

JJ Merelo and many other people fixed a lot of issues related to the renaming process in the documentation. And of course Jonathan Stowe moved their Noise portal to the Raku era.

Weekly Challenge

The Raku entries for Challenge #48:

Ryan C. Thompson also did reviews of Raku solutions to Challenge #046 and Raku solutions to Challenge #047. And Challenge #49 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

Jonathan Worthington fixed a handle leak with Proc::Async and fixed mixing in functionality into the Raku grammar.

and fixed mixing in functionality into the Raku grammar. Stefan Seifert streamlined the MoarVM release process. They also wrote a patch to fix a problem related to native nums and JITting (spotted by Peter du Marchie van Voorthuysen on the Windows backend) and improved dependency checking during pre-compilation.

release process. They also wrote a patch to fix a problem related to native nums and JITting (spotted by Peter du Marchie van Voorthuysen on the Windows backend) and improved dependency checking during pre-compilation. Daniel Green fixed a potential memory corruption issue on some failure paths, and improved static optimization of Junction s.

s. Patrick Böker allowed Rakudo to run on Unicode paths on Windows again and worked on solving issues with continuous testing on CircleCI.

Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed some recently introduced issues with Date / DateTime and supplied a work-around for a crash in stress-testing Lock::Async . They also fixed an issue in containerization of Attribute default values and implemented index($string,@needles) / rindex($string,@needles) functionality.

/ and supplied a work-around for a crash in stress-testing . They also fixed an issue in containerization of default values and implemented / functionality. Vadim Belman fixed the is rw trait on classes and roles.

trait on classes and roles. Peter du Marchie van Voorthuysen improved the performance of Seq listification.

listification. And many smaller fixes and improvements.

Questions about Raku

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on perl6-users

PCRE -> Raku RE by Paul Procacci.

Comments about Raku

New Raku Modules

Math::Libgsl::Polynomial by Fernando Santagata.

HTTP::API::MusicBrainz by Patrick Spek.

Syslog::Parse by JJ Merelo.

Supply::Folds by Ben Davies.

Updated Raku Modules

Winding down

Wow. So much happening in one week of the Raku Programming Language! Good to see bunch of new modules, module updates, compiler releases, progress on a new Raku book. I’m hoping next week will not be a disappointment!