This week I’m taking back over from lizmat who thankfully stepped in when other responsibilities kept me away from Perl 6 for a while. I kind of like her format a bit better than my big list of bullet points; I’ll try to do it more like her. Feedback is, of course, always welcome.

Performance improvements

After TimToady posted an implementation of the Textonyms task on RosettaCode that was too slow for comfort, lizmat had a look at the .trans method (which also powers the tr/// operator) and quickly made the common case of having only a Pair of two strings at least 20x faster. Another case of trans – only removing characters instead of replacing characters with others – got between 10x and 200x faster (depending on whether you remove all characters (200x faster) or no characters (10x)). These changes made TimToady’s code run 36x faster, the run time went from 6 minutes down to 10 seconds. Yay!

Availability of “long” type

FROGGS made a type “long” available – especially useful for use with NativeCall – to use whatever the current machine thinks a “long” is. This work also includes the ability to specify sizes for other things. In a related change, Buf objects will now report the correct size in “.bytes” when the size of an individual element is not one byte.

NativeCall’s in Rakudo now

NativeCall has been moved into the same repository that holds Rakudo. The reason for that is that their versions usually have to track each other very closely and having both in the same repository makes things a lot less strenuous.

Stricter laxness

Starting a Perl 6 script with a literal or a bare “v6;” is no longer considered obvious enough for parsing a script in lax mode. Especially since code run on the commandline with perl6 -e are lax by default.

An Interview and also a Blog Post

Paul Krill of Infoworld interviewed Larry Wall last wednesday (comments on reddit). On sunday our very own masak wrote a blogpost on mazes.

Syntax highlighting on doc.perl6.org

Thanks to paul t cochrane ([ptc] on the IRC) we now have syntax highlighted code blocks on doc.perl6.org and avuserow has a branch that uses Inline::Python instead of shelling out for a great performance improvement.

Native references

jnthn has been working on a branch “native-ref” that’s just recently been merged in MoarVM, but currently isn’t being taken advantage of in nqp and rakudo. It will – once merged – allow native values to be lvalues properly for things like having ++ on native values and having rw-accessors on native attributes in classes and working with values in Buf objects and friends. As far as I can tell, the code making use of the changes in the branch will be merged after the 2015.02 release has been tagged.

That’s it from me for this week. I hope I didn’t forget too much; I kind of have to get back into the swing of things 🙂 As always, feel free to point out things that are missing or wrong. See you next week!