It’s official: the Perl Foundation is one of the organizations participating in the Google Summer of Code this year. So if you are a student looking for some cool things to do this summer related to Perl 6 (but also Perl 5 if you are more so inclined), be sure to contact Mark Keating, Makoto Nozaki or JJ Merelo. If you’d like to participate but don’t have any inspiration yet, have a look at the current list of ideas! (Facebook comments, related tweets: 1, 2).

German Perl Workshop

The German Perl Workshop is almost here (6 – 8 March). In the final program, there are quite some Perl 6 related presentations:

Hope to see you there!

Swiss Perl Workshop Dates

Lee Johnson didn’t keep us in suspense very long: the Swiss Perl Workshop 2019 will be on 16/17 August, about a week after the European Perl Conference. This should make it easier for travellers from far away to combine the two events, with some vacation in Europe inbetween.

Future features of Sparrow

Alexey Melezhik has blogged about the future features of Sparrow, and about how he’s progressing on porting all of Sparrow to Perl 6 (from Perl 5).

London.pm Tech Meet

Mohammad S Anwar describes the first Tech Meet of 2019, with Perl 6 presentations by Simon Proctor (about meta-operators) and Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira (about the Red ORM).

An API for Holidays

Tom Browder has taken on to blogging about his journey of creating a Perl 6 version API for Holiday API (Public Holidays and Observances for Developers). It’s indeed great to see Perl 6 there in the list of supported languages, with Python, Ruby, PHP, Go and Node.js! (Reddit comments).

And the winner is…

Alexander Kiryuhin (Altai-man) is the winner of last weekend’s Squashathon. The plushy Camelia will be in the mail to him shortly. Congratulations! And also thanks to all of the other people that have participated!

Core Developments

Ticket status of last week and the month of February.

Daniel Green improved the error message on sprintf if a value could not be coerced to the type indicated in the format string.

improved the error message on if a value could not be coerced to the type indicated in the format string. Paweł Murias made it possible to evaluate generated code at runtime in the browser (on the Javascript backend).

made it possible to evaluate generated code at runtime in the browser (on the Javascript backend). Vadim Belman fixed a problem with gisting certain values in certain error messages.

fixed a problem with gisting certain values in certain error messages. Code by Jeremy Studer fixed an issue with laziness detection of the [\+] meta-operator.

fixed an issue with laziness detection of the meta-operator. Nick Logan replaced the internal JSON parser with one that is based on JSON::Fast , which should make zef quite a bit faster.

replaced the internal parser with one that is based on , which should make quite a bit faster. Code by Vittore F. Scolari made the say statement about 8% faster.

made the statement about 8% faster. And some other fixes and improvements

Questions about Perl 6

Only 9 questions to go for 1000 StackOverflow questions!

Meanwhile on Facebook

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Travis-CI by Fernando Santagata .

. .payload by ToddAndMargo .

by . Valid values? by ToddAndMargo.

Meanwhile on Twitter

Perl 6 in comments

Perl 6 Modules

New modules:

NativeLibs by Salvador Ortiz .

. Random::Choice by Itsuki Toyota.

Updated modules:

AttrX::Mooish by Vadim Belman .

. Font::FreeType, HTML::Canvas::To::PDF by David Warring .

. Numeric::Nearest by Drclaw .

. Date Names by Tom Browder .

. Red by Fernando Correa de Oliveira .

. Term::Choose::Util by Matthäus Kiem .

. Test::HTTP::Server by Simon Proctor .

. LibCurl by Curt Tilmes .

. Cache::Async by Robert Lemmen .

. Smack, Path::Router by Sterling Hanenkamp .

. Perl6::Parser by Jeff Goff .

. Archive::SimpleZip by Paul Marquess .

. GTK::V3 by Marcel Timmerman .

. Grid by Haytham Elganiny .

. XDG::BaseDirectory by Jonathan Stowe .

. Algorithm::GooglePolylineEncoding, Proc::InvokeEditor, Trait::Env, Test::HTTP::Server, Range::SetOps by Simon Proctor.

Winding Down

It’s good to see a lot of tweets, new modules, updated modules, presentations, and to top it off this week, participation in the GSOC. Cool stuff. See you again next week, when yours truly will tell you how she recovered from the German Perl Workshop and the trip there and back again.