Or, how to go from 2.5x slower to only 1.1x slower than Perl 5. Jonathan Worthington explains it all in his blog post titled “Optimizing reading lines from a file“. But that’s not all he’s done in the past week! Last Friday he also gave an online presentation titled “Primitives, Composition, Patterns” (slides), which was part of the sponsoring by Nick Logan. A must see if you want to get up to date on the latest in concurrency in Perl 6! And also a prime example of the quality of deliverables of sponsoring Jonathan.

Seqs, Drugs, And Rock’n’Roll

Zoffix Znet published part 2 of his blog post series about Iterator s and Seq s. Please look at part 1, in which he discusses how a Seq can .cache its values, if you haven’t done so already. Part 2 delves into how to write your own Iterator and what you can do to optimize it for a number of use cases.

Other blog posts

So you want to be a Presenter

You can still be one at The Perl Conference in Amsterdam, as the Call for Papers has been extended to 7 July. There is no schedule yet, but the list of accepted talks is available. On it, you can already find the following presentations that have some relation to Perl 6:

Core Developments

Jonathan Worthington worked a lot on Proc and Proc::Async . For instance, it is now possible to get the native descriptor in Proc::Async . This was done by creating a Proc::Async::Pipe , which is a subclass of Supply with a native-descriptor method that returns a Promise that will produce the native descriptor as soon as it becomes available. Reading stdout / stderr is now also delayed until the Proc::Async::Pipe Supply is actually tap ped. These changes now allow the standard output/error of one process to be chained to standard input of another process.

worked a lot on and . For instance, it is now possible to get the native descriptor in . This was done by creating a , which is a subclass of with a method that returns a that will produce the native descriptor as soon as it becomes available. Reading / is now also delayed until the Supply is actually ped. These changes now allow the standard output/error of one process to be chained to standard input of another process. Zoffix Znet introduced the %*SUB-MAIN-OPTS dynamic hash support for tweaking the parsing of MAIN parameters.

introduced the dynamic hash support for tweaking the parsing of parameters. Elizabeth Mattijsen continued her work on set operators, specifically on (+) (the baggy addition operator) and made sure that all set operators handle lazy lists correctly. She also reverted Baggy semantics for (<=) and (<) after it was pointed out that these changes caused problems with some of the already documented examples, and the fact that there is a special set operator for Baggy semantics: (<+) .

continued her work on set operators, specifically on (the baggy addition operator) and made sure that all set operators handle lazy lists correctly. She also reverted semantics for and (<) after it was pointed out that these changes caused problems with some of the already documented examples, and the fact that there is a special set operator for semantics: . And some other smaller fixes and improvements.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Ecosystem Additions

Chart::Gnuplot by Toyota Itsuki .

. Sparky by Alexey Melezhik.

Winding Down

A nice week with some surprises. A good beginning of the second half of 2017. Be sure to check again next week for more Perl 6 news!