Yes, the Perl 6 Weekly is back. If there is one thing yours truly has learned, that it is not a good idea to skip 2 issues. Once, in the past, maybe. But nowadays, it just almost gets too much to process while writing the weekly. And probably to read as well. Well, hoping not too much was missed in the past 3 weeks, let’s go!

PerlCon in Riga

The Riga video team has not found the time yet to create separate videos of the presentations yet. There are full days streams available though:

A number of participants have already posted reports of the event:

Swiss Perl Workshop Videos

Thanks to Lee Johnson, the videos of the Swiss Perl Workshop 2019 have become available. These are the ones with Perl 6 content:

August Squashathon

Luis F. Uceta has become the winner of this month’s Documentation proofreading Squashathon. Thanks to all other participants: better luck winning a plushy Camelia next time!

Second tutorial: Fun with objects

David Cassel posted his second Perl 6 tutorial: Fun with Objects. It feels there is a Big Bang Theory reference somewhere in there.

Trials and Tribulations

Madeleine Goebel published two updates on her GSOC project:

It is really good to see so much progress on a feature that could well become one of the unique selling points of Rakudo Perl 6!

D&D Rolls in Perl 6

Tyler Limkemann went out playing and came back with a very nice blog post about rolling dice (/r/perl6, /r/programming, /r/geek, /r/perl comments). He also created a very nice Unicode character property lister (Reddit comments).

Still stun me all these years later

Aaron Sherman looked at a JSON grammar and felt his head spin. He also used this opportunity to create a guide for other programming languages wanting to implement Perl 6 regular expressions (Reddit comments).

Dollar signs will not kill you

A rather interesting interview with Alan, user of obscure languages (Reddit comments).

Docker builds are your friend

Sterling Hanenkamp took his new blog for a spin with “Multi-stage Docker builds are your friend“. It shows how it helps him build a single end-product that’s uncluttered by extra build configuration and tooling.

Hilbert with Cairo inside GTK

Timo Paulssen got adventurous and live coded a Hilbert curve with Cairo inside of GTK.

Not A Dialect

Aaron Sherman explores the differences between Perl 5 and Perl 6 with excellent linguistic research and examples (Reddit comments).

Forest fire numbers

Aaron Sherman also did a little challenge of his own with “Fun little challenge: Forest Fire numbers“. One could wonder whether a submission for the Perl Weekly Challenge wouldn’t have been a better idea.

Electric Boogaloo

Jeff Goff posted another blog posts on templating in Perl 6 called “Templates II: Electric Boogaloo“.

Expanding .perl

Finally, Aaron Sherman started a re-evaluation of the .perl method, which resulted in a problem solving issue.

Perl Weekly Challenge #19

Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #19:

Damian Conway repeated his look back on the challenge with “Greed is good, balance is better, beauty is best.” (Reddit comments).

Perl Weekly Challenge #20

Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #20:

Damian Conway again repeated his look back on the challenge with “With friends like these…” (Reddit, Hacker News comments).

Perl Weekly Challenge #21

Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #21:

Meanwhile, Challenge #22 is up for your perusal!

Core developments

Ticket status of July.

Stefan Seifert continued his excellent debugging work in the bowels of MoarVM, which improved the stability of MoarVM significantly. He also introduced a new debugging level, that causes a garbage collect on every allocation. He also fixed a race condition with precompilation.

continued his excellent debugging work in the bowels of MoarVM, which improved the stability of MoarVM significantly. He also introduced a new debugging level, that causes a garbage collect on allocation. He also fixed a race condition with precompilation. Ben Davies made socket family handling portable across OS’s.

made socket family handling portable across OS’s. Timo Paulssen fixed various profiling issues and improved comments in the spesh log. And put in some optimizations.

fixed various profiling issues and improved comments in the spesh log. And put in some optimizations. cygx added a function to MoarVM to run bytecode from memory and fixed the build on MingW systems.

added a function to MoarVM to run bytecode from memory and fixed the build on systems. Jonathan Worthington implemented various optimizations, one of which saved 10% on a DBIish record insertion benchmark.

implemented various optimizations, one of which saved 10% on a record insertion benchmark. Stéphane Payrard fixed the documentation of various nqp:: opcodes.

fixed the documentation of various opcodes. Paweł Murias fixed various issues on the Javascript backend.

fixed various issues on the Javascript backend. ZhongnianTao added support for the GB2312 encoding (simplified Chinese).

added support for the encoding (simplified Chinese). Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed an issue with Date objects losing their formatter with certain operations.

fixed an issue with objects losing their formatter with certain operations. Vadim Belman fixed EVAL when run at compile time in the mainline of a precompiled module. He also made sure that each compiled setting knows of which language version it is.

fixed when run at compile time in the mainline of a precompiled module. He also made sure that each compiled setting knows of which language version it is. Christian Bartolomäus fixed various issues on the JVM backend.

fixed various issues on the JVM backend. And some smaller 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:

VCard by Marcel Timmerman .

. Template::Prometheus by Patrick Spek .

. Docker::API by Curt Tilmes .

. Console::Blackjack by Greg Donald .

. Tomty by Alexey Melezhik.

Updated modules:

Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gdk3, Gnome::Gtk3, Tinky::Hash, Gnome::Gtk3::Glade, Auth::SCRAM, Decimal, GraphQL::Html, Library, TMap, PKCS5, Rdf, SemiXML, UEncoding, MongoDB, Neo4j, Semaphore::ReadersWriters, Unicode::PRECIS, XML::Actions, Config::DataLang::Refine, Gnome::Glib by Marcel Timmerman .

. Sparrow6, Tomtit by Alexey Melehzhik .

. Libui by Travis Gibson .

. Physics::Measure by Steve Roe .

. App::nm2perl6 by Jeff Goff .

. Algorithm::NaiveBayes by Itsuki Toyota .

. String::Fold by Patrick Spek .

. Supply::Timeout by Cono .

. Template::Classic by Chloé Kekoa .

. Findbin, FileSystem::Parent by Steven Lembark .

. Image::QRCode by Fernando Santagata .

. Module::Pod by Doeg Schrag .

. OEIS by Tobias Boege .

. Trait::Env by Simon Proctor .

. Bailador by Martin Barth .

. Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira.

Winding Down

At PerlCon in Riga, yours truly announced that she would open up a problem solving” issue, in which she would ask to rename the “Perl 6 Programming Language” to (eventually) “The Raku Programming Language”. (/r/perl, /r/perl6, perl6-users, Facebook, Lobsters comments).

Some selected comments from the issue itself (in chronological order):

After getting a better idea on how this would work, this resulted in a Pull Request, which is currently under review. If this pull request gets accepted by all reviewers, then this will cause “Perl 6” to be renamed to “Raku”.

And with that out of the way for now: next week’s Perl 6 Weekly will most likely be delayed, or possibly skipped altogether, due to yours truly travelling for some non-Perl related events. So, if not next week, see you in two weeks time then for more Perl 6 news!