As lizmat++ is currently enjoying a well-deserved rest in the Caribbean, today’s Weekly is guest-written by a Zoffix! Hopefully, it’s still going to be good…

It’s been a slow week, as many Sixers are attending the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM). As was mentioned in an earlier Weekly, there will be some Perl 6 talks. The videos for them already started rolling in: Perl 6 on Jupyter by Brian Duggan (slides and code).

So far, the event seems to be going well:

<tyil> the perl stand at fosdem was awesome, much more people that

showed interest in Perl 6 than I imagined

SQUASHathon

This weekend saw our 6th Monthly SQUASHathon happen. This month’s topic was squashing tickets marked with testneeded label and the participants made 47 commits towards that effort.

2018.01 Rakudo Star Binaries, Still Pending

stmuk++ is still testing the binary Release Candidates for 2018.01 release of Rakudo Star. You can help out by downloading the RC0 binaries and reporting any problems you find.

Core Developments

This week, 48 tickets were handled, with 26 of them resolved.

ash++ implemented a push-all optimization to List.roll

optimization to nine++ made several improvements to start up speed, by improving code of Stash.merge-symbols , optimizing CompUnit::PrecompilationUnit::deserialize , as well as moving setup of certain objects like $*PERL and $*VM to compile time (this work is still ongoing)

, optimizing , as well as moving setup of certain objects like and to compile time (this work is still ongoing) MasterDuke++ continued working on implementing JIT templates for various ops, merging 30 more this week.

ugexe++ fixed CompUnit::RepositoryRegistry to point to correct location for home repository

samcv++ added support for windows-1251 (Cyrillic) encoding on both MoarVM and JVM backends, and fixed several bugs in windows-1252 encoding with several characters not being correctly encoded

pmurias++ continued working on the JS backed, dealing with utf8-c8 encoding

Kaiepi++ improved docs and Configure.pl option for building MoarVM

option for building MoarVM jstuder-gh++ fixed a bug with state variables inside a do loop

variables inside a titsuki++ and jnthn++ de-bittrotted nqp repository’s files and documentation

dogbert17++ fixed segfaults when errors were encountered while opening MVM_*_LOG files

files brrt++ added a NOOP expr JIT operator

timotimo++ made sure PHI were not output into expr JIT log as well as made a proposal for datagram-oriented API for UDP sockets

zoffix++ redesigned the Whatever , WhateverCode , and HyperWhatever currier, fixing a number of bugs, as well as making nested Whatever closures faster to compile and run (a 5-arg Whatever now runs 2.2x faster and compiles 8% faster). He also made .= method calls 39x-64x faster.

Other assorted work core devs performed included:

Fixed a bug in sort ing a 2-element list with arity-2 sorter

ing a 2-element list with arity-2 sorter Fixed crashes in compile-time executed where thunks

thunks Changed semantics of :b quoter tweak, to behave more like qq quoter, fixing a bug in :b:s quoter combination

quoter tweak, to behave more like quoter, fixing a bug in quoter combination Fixed bogus error in REPL when a none Junction was a result of the expression

was a result of the expression Fixed crash with ENTER phaser nested inside LEAVE phaser

phaser nested inside phaser Fixed crash in Proxy.perl

Learning Perl 6

The Learning Perl 6 book by brian d foy has reached a milestone in its production: all of the research has been completed. All that remains to do is cleaning everything up and doing a bit of rework on some chapters.

Blog Posts

ash++ continued the DAILY Perl 6 Inside Out blog posts (while also writing for the Russian-language perl6.ru):

Reddit

Twitter

perl6 regex search and replace is concise and readable. https://t.co/iUuQhG50VL via @wordpressdotcom — Brian Chiu (@BrianOn99) January 31, 2018

Winding Down

That’s about it for the week! Hope you enjoyed the guest-written Weekly. It’s a tough job writing these, so be sure to thank lizmat++ for doing them.

-Ofun