It could be the cold speaking, but somehow the past week felt a bit silent on the Perl 6 development front. Looking at the traffic on #perl6 , the past week definitely looks lighter than the weeks before. But quite a lot of work was done nonetheless!

Rakudo Star 2017.01

Steve Mynott has just released Rakudo Star 2017.01. If you don’t want to be on the bleeding edge of Rakudo Perl 6 development, but still want to get all of the nice improvements in speed and functionality, that’s the distribution you should try!

Think Perl 6

O’Reilly has formally announced the Perl 6 book by Laurent Rosenfeld: Think Perl 6 – How To Think Like A Computer Scientist.

If you want to learn how to program and think like a computer scientist, this practical guide will get you started on your programming journey with Perl 6, the new version of the popular programming language. Ideal for beginners, Think Perl 6 contains numerous exercises with multiple solutions and a lot of code examples. Even experienced programmers will learn a lot from this book, especially those familiar with Perl 5. It’s designed for teaching computer science to beginners in universities.

There should be early version ebooks available. If they aren’t yet, please try again in a few days!

6.d.PREVIEW available

Based on the work of Stefan Seifert almost a year ago, we now finally have a use v6.d.PREVIEW with actual new / incompatible features. The most important of these so far has been the adding of support for non-blocking await / react by Jonathan Worthington. In use v6.c , an await or a react would block the thread in which it occurred, making the system hang if the number of active awaits would get near the maximum number of threads available. If you do use v6.d.PREVIEW , this is no longer the case. But this also implies that one can no longer be sure that code is actually continued on the same OS thread after an await or react , which may cause some problems e.g. specifically when interfacing with external libraries with NativeCall .

Other Core developments

Zoffix Znet fixed quite some bugs again, such as colonpair-extended names on subroutines (e.g. sub foo:bar<ber> ), bugs related to IO::Handle.lines and the .= initialization with types that have a :: in the name (such as my Foo::Bar $a .= new ).

fixed quite some bugs again, such as colonpair-extended names on subroutines (e.g. ), bugs related to and the initialization with types that have a in the name (such as ). Samantha McVey fixed some bugs and added support for matching on Unicode properties, such as say "a" ~~ /<:Letter>/ . She also added the last of the Unicode named sequences, which are in addition to the Emoji sequences that had been added earlier. Getting codepoints or sequences by name is also now case-insensitive, "\c[solidus] \c[Grinning Face]"; # / 😀 . These functionalities are now documented.

fixed some bugs and added support for matching on Unicode properties, such as . She also added the last of the Unicode named sequences, which are in addition to the Emoji sequences that had been added earlier. Getting codepoints or sequences by name is also now case-insensitive, . These functionalities are now documented. Stefan Seifert made sure that all CompUnit::PrecompilationRepository implementations have a try-load functionality.

made sure that all implementations have a functionality. Christian Bartolomäus unbroke the JVM-build that got broken due to the v6.d.PREVIEW work.

unbroke the JVM-build that got broken due to the work. TimToady made parsing in general about 2 percent faster, making the parsing of the setting a second faster.

made parsing in general about 2 percent faster, making the parsing of the setting a second faster. Elizabeth Mattijsen worked on making a lot of iterator based features faster and test coverage of iterators more complete.

worked on making a lot of iterator based features faster and test coverage of iterators more complete. And, as usual, a flock of other fixes and improvements!

Blog Posts

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

Ecosystem Additions

A quiet week here as well, apart from Jonathan Stowe++ adopting a number of orphaned distributions.

Winding Down

The coming two issues of the Perl 6 Weekly will be brought to you by Timo Paulssen (again). After the FOSDEM next weekend, yours truly will be enjoying some quality R&R in the Gulf of Mexico and will be mostly offline for the duration. Hope the cold I have now will lift itself before then 🙂