Samantha McVey explains in an excellent blog post titled “Secure Hashing for MoarVM to Prevent DOS Attacks” how hash-based Denial Of Service attacks work, and what she has done so far and will do in the near future to prevent the evil-doers from getting their way. And how this may affect development and testing. Along with links how other programming languages have reacted to this kind of threat (/r/perl, /r/perl6 and FaceBook comments).

Your help is needed!

JJ Merelo describes the similarities between graffiti and the art of writing Perl 6 documentation. How you can be proud about your own contribution, but also about the ever-evolving result.

What do you think about Perl 6?

An interesting discussion on Reddit’s r/ProgrammingLanguages on the question:

So Perl 6 is a successor of Perl 5. It is a new Perl that changes language syntax and adds new features like Grammars. What do you think about Perl 6?

With some nice descriptions of the unique features of Perl 6 and how some people see its future.

CaR TPF Grant Report

Zoffix Znet has presented his (first) grant report for the CaR Grant. The progress has been mostly in getting a still better comprehension of the problem at hand, and how proposed solutions may or may not achieve the desired goals (Reddit and FaceBook comments).

Getting started with Sparrowdo

Patrick Spek has written a nice tutorial about the use of Sparrowdo titled “Getting started with Sparrowdo “. A must read if you’re looking into automating menial jobs.

Welcome Tom Browder!

It was not too long ago when Tom Browder submitted his first Pull Request. Since then, quite a few more Pull Requests were submitted by him. Last week he received a Rakudo commit bit so that he can now make changes to Rakudo without being Warnocked. Yours truly is looking forward to more contributions by him!

Core Developments

Ticket status of past week.

Samatha McVey kept working on improving the MoarVM hash implementation.

kept working on improving the MoarVM hash implementation. Christian Bartolomäus continued guarding the JVM backend from being left behind. Together with Jeremy Studer he also fixed an issue with the new nqp::splice op on the JVM backend.

continued guarding the JVM backend from being left behind. Together with he also fixed an issue with the new op on the JVM backend. Tom Browder fixed an issue unexpected pod table failures and an error in handling non-breaking whitespace in pod rendering.

fixed an issue unexpected pod table failures and an error in handling non-breaking whitespace in pod rendering. Lucas Buchala tweaked Test ‘s pass (so that it always returns True ) and flunk (add a default message if none given).

tweaked ‘s (so that it always returns ) and (add a default message if none given). Stefan Seifert speeded up module loading a tiny bit. Together with Zoffix Znet he also worked a lot on the array initialization internals.

speeded up module loading a tiny bit. Together with he also worked a lot on the array initialization internals. Nick Logan fixed an issue with the distribution path format on Windows.

fixed an issue with the distribution path format on Windows. Elizabeth Mattijsen made @a.splice about 20% faster. She also implemented a new use p5isms pragma to disable “looks like a Perl 5 construct” compile time errors.

made about 20% faster. She also implemented a new pragma to disable “looks like a Perl 5 construct” compile time errors. And many more fixes and improvements.

Other blog posts

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

Meanwhile on FaceBook

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Perl 6 in comments

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

Test::Declare by Darren Foreman .

. Time::Repeat by Arne Sommer .

. P5__DATA__ by Elizabeth Mattijsen (for the Butterfly CPAN Plan).

(for the Butterfly CPAN Plan). App::GymScheduler by Zoffix Znet.

Updated modules:

PDF::Class by David Warring .

. Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert .

. Desktop::Notify by Fernando Santagata .

. Concurrent::Trie by Jonathan Worthington .

. Cache::Async by Robert Lemmen .

. P5ref, P5getservbyname by Elizabeth Mattijsen (for the Butterfly CPAN Plan).

Winding Down

Quite a diverse week again. Lots of blog posts. Not so many core developments just before the Rakudo Compiler Release 2018.05. But outside of that, wow! Can’t wait to see next week’s batch of goodies. So, until then!