This week saw a lot of releases! First of all, the Rakudo Compiler Release 2020.01 was finished by Alexander Kiryuhin, quickly followed by Claudio Ramirez packaging the release for many, many Linux distributions and JJ Merelo with an Alpine Docker image. Then Fernando Santagata started releasing modules that support the GNU Scientific Library (see the New Modules section). Jonathan Worthington released a new version of Cro 0.8.2.1 as well as a new version of the Comma Community IDE (main new features). And Stefan Seifert released a new version of Inline::Perl5. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg this week. Good to see so much new stuff!

How we built Comma

On 16 January, Jonathan Worthington gave a webinar on how Comma, the Raku IDE, was built. You can either look at the slides or look at the video of the webinar.

Squashathon

This Saturday (8 February 2020, one week later than usual because of FOSDEM) will see another Squashathon, this time focused on closing tickets from the old RT ticket system that are now available in the old issue tracker. Every contributor gets a free virtual pizza. And the winner (in most/best contributions) will get a real, physical plushy Camelia sent to them!

Rakudist custom

Alexey Melehzhik expands on RakuDist again, with Raku Modules Custom Installation.

Renaming Progress

Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev performed the magic IRC incantations to make the old #perl6 IRC channel automatically forward to the new #raku IRC channel.

Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev performed the magic IRC incantations to make the old #perl6 IRC channel automatically forward to the new #raku IRC channel. Dan Book reports that files using the new Raku extensions (such as .rakumod ) are now labelled as “Raku files” on Github.

) are now labelled as “Raku files” on Github. Andrew Shitov reports that all of his Perl 6 and Raku books are frozen / archived on Github for future generations.

Gabor Szabo pretended to be a Raku newbie and was not happy with the result.

Elizabeth Mattijsen changed the name as shown with raku -v to “Raku 6.d”, from “Perl 6.d”.

Weekly Challenge

The Raku entries for Challenge #45:

Challenge #46 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

Daniel Green completed the long work to make MoarVM use the most up-to-date version of the libtommath library.

library. Elizabeth Mattijsen added a compile time check for default values for class attributes (with help from Vadim Belman) and fixed an issue related to $/ in Regex.ACCEPTS . They also made Str.comb(Regex) about 1.8x as fast, and Str.split(Regex) about 15% faster.

in . They also made about 1.8x as fast, and about 15% faster. Christian Bartolomäus fixed various (new) issues on the JVM backend.

Ben Davies fixed an issue with Parameter.raku .

. Stefan Seifert added some options that improve building of Rakudo, specifically for packagers.

Patrick Böker added a Continuous Integration precomp release build pipeline and fixed some issue with the Windows binary-release build script.

And some smaller fixes and improvements, mainly in preparation of the Rakudo 2020.01 compiler release.

Questions about Raku

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on Facebook

If you’re interested in developments there, go to the Perl 6 group homepage.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Comments about Raku

New Raku Modules

Updated Raku Modules

Winding down

Although yours truly only spent a few hours at FOSDEM this year, it was good to see a lot of friends and discuss stuff. And to see the Perl / Raku stand to be regularly mobbed by many, many people. Yours truly hopes to see many new users of Raku because of it in the coming weeks. Or maybe next week already! See you then for more news about the Raku Programming Language!