Yes, it looks like the Perl 6 books are multiplying! Almost a month ago, Gábor Szabó announced his crowdfunding campaign for “Web Application Development in Perl 6”. In the past week we also saw J.J. Merelo‘s book “Learning to program with Perl 6” appear on Amazon in a Kindle edition. And we saw Moritz Lenz publish the first chapters of his new “Searching and Parsing with Perl 6 Regexes” book. It’s great to see this many books arriving!

2017.06 Compiler Release

Zoffix Znet released Rakudo Compiler 2017.06 with his trusty bots and a full ecosystem toast. Claudio Ramirez was hot on his tail with the release of packages for several Unix systems. There is no Rakudo Star release planned for this month: next month should see one!

for ^1000 optimization is back

The optimization of for loops that run for a set number of times, has been re-instated by Timo Paulssen and then further refined by Jonathan Worthington (graph). So there will now be more situations where the overhead of running such a loop will be greatly reduced.

Proc overhauled

The internals of Proc have been completely overhauled by Jonathan Worthington, and is now also completely supported on the JVM backend as well.

Optimizer and JIT improvements

Jonathan Worthington also spent a lot of time on several static optimizer and spesh improvements, as well as adding more possibilities for code to get JITted. It has caused the canary in the goldmine benchmark to go almost go down below 4 seconds. Which means it got about 1.5x faster in the past 6 months!

Grant Extension Proposal

If you like the work that Jonathan did the past week, you should probably leave a comment at his proposal for extension of his Perl 6 Core Development Grant!

Other Core Developments

All of these developments made it to the 2017.06 compiler release, except where noted.

Zoffix Znet fixed an issue with labelled next ‘s. He also fixed all of the methods on Proc that expect the Proc to be done. And fixed the debugger (but alas not in time for 2017.06).

fixed an issue with labelled ‘s. He also fixed all of the methods on that expect the to be done. And fixed the debugger (but alas not in time for 2017.06). Samantha McVey made sure that improper values for RAKUDO_MODULE_DEBUG do not break module loading in nqp. She also provided a new set of Collation features (alas also not in time for 2017.06).

made sure that improper values for do not break module loading in nqp. She also provided a new set of Collation features (alas also not in time for 2017.06). Nick Logan made sure a source file of a module is only slurped once during installation. He also made sure the :merge functionality on run() and shell() no longer deadlocks.

made sure a source file of a module is only slurped once during installation. He also made sure the functionality on and no longer deadlocks. Stefan Seifert added more checksum related information for when RAKUDO_MODULE_DEBUG is set.

added more checksum related information for when is set. Steve Mynott optimized $*KERNEL initialization for OpenBSD.

optimized initialization for OpenBSD. Elizabeth Mattijsen made sure that the default .WHY returns a Nil value that will point to the appropriate section of docs.perl6.org when being gist ed (e.g. when it is being shown in the REPL ). She also fixed some issues with Map (<) Map and made Str.subst(Str,Str) (substitute a string once in another string) 12x faster.

made sure that the default returns a value that will point to the appropriate section of docs.perl6.org when being ed (e.g. when it is being shown in the ). She also fixed some issues with and made (substitute a string once in another string) 12x faster. And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Blog Posts

Meanwhile on Twitter

Not a lot going on that wasn’t already covered in this issue:

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Ecosystem Additions

Font::QueryInfo by Samantha McVey .

. App::ecogen by Nick Logan.

Winding Down

From a sweltering place in the south of the Netherlands, it’s yours truly wishing you all a good week. Please check in again next week for more Perl 6 news!

<plug>Oh, and if you want to attend The Perl Conference in Amsterdam, you can now order tickets at the price-level you want / need!</plug>