This week saw the peaceful passing of Jonathan “Scott” Duff (aka perlpilot and PerlJam) at the much too early age of 47. Scott has been heavily involved with Perl 6 since at least the days of Pugs (as far as yours truly has been able to trace back).

Although he would have described his contributions to Perl 6 as small, they have been important in that they helped others to build further at the very early stages of Perl 6. Perhaps more importantly, from at least 2005 until last summer (when he became too ill), Scott has participated almost daily in discussions on the #perl6 IRC channel in the kind and supporting way that people who know him, appreciated him for.

He will be sorely missed. Scott: thanks for all the fish!

Scott on Facebook (Facebook users only) and the go fund me campaign of his family: all donations will be appreciated.

This year’s final Advent posts

Too late for last week’s Perl 6 Weekly:

Getting things done

An interaction about the use of grep and map on the #perl6 IRC channel made Alexey Melezhik realize that it would be handy to have such an example be made more accessible. He even has a little movie to show what that would look like.

Calling subs and typing

Elizabeth Mattijsen had the 9th article about migrating from Perl 5 to Perl 6 published on opensource.com: Calling subs and typing in Perl 6 (Reddit comments).

Squashathon time again

Next Saturday will see yet another Community Squashathon, this time focused on testing. And as usual, “Saturday” will be interpreted as “Saturday anywhere on Earth”, so it will be more like 47 hours worth of fixing, documenting and adding tests. Please join us in making sure we get Perl 6 even better tested than it already is!

Core Developments

Two weeks of core developments this time, as promised last week:

Nicolas Georges fixed an issue with utf-16 encoding with regards to null-bytes.

fixed an issue with encoding with regards to null-bytes. Timo Paulssen worked a lot on optimizations in MoarVM . He also made Carray[] about 2x as fast.

worked a lot on optimizations in . He also made about 2x as fast. Stefan Seifert fixed various segfaults in MoarVM , as well as spending a lot of time finding a pesky issue (with a 3 char fix) when building MoarVM on big endian systems. And he removed all of the old MAST writing infrastructure, which is no longer needed.

fixed various segfaults in , as well as spending a lot of time finding a pesky issue (with a 3 char fix) when building on big endian systems. And he removed all of the old writing infrastructure, which is no longer needed. Paweł Murias implemented all of the new read/write functionalities on Blob / Buf and added support for num32 and num64 on the Javascript backend.

implemented all of the new read/write functionalities on / and added support for and on the Javascript backend. Elizabeth Mattijsen added blob8.read-bits/read-ubits and buf8.write-bits/write-ubits methods to read/write any sequence of bits in buffers.

added and methods to read/write any sequence of in buffers. Nick Logan added a cache for distributions for the CompUnit::Repository::FileSystem backend, making the use of -I less sensitive to potentially large directories.

added a cache for distributions for the backend, making the use of less sensitive to potentially large directories. And many other smaller bug fixes and improvements.

Questions about Perl 6

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on Facebook

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Perl 6 in comments

Perl 6 modules

New Modules: PodCache::Module by Richard Hainsworth .

. Hash::Timeout by Fernando Santagata.

Updated modules:

HTTP::Supply by Sterling Hanenkamp .

. StrictClass by Martin Barth .

. TAP by Leon Timmermans .

. Tomtit by Alexey Melezhik .

. Archive::Libarchive, Archive::Libarchive::Raw by Fernando Santagata.

Winding Down

A week with very mixed feelings. Be careful with any fireworks if you’re celebrating the New Year! Yours truly hopes to see you all and well reading the next Perl 6 Weekly!