Yes, it’s going to be a prime year this year.

say "Prime Year" if 2017.is-prime;

In other ways, Perl 6 is also ready for the future!

say "News" if True but False;

Leaving it to the reader to decide which way that will go 😏

Perl 6 at a Glance

Andrew Shitov has beaten everybody with the first (modern) Perl 6 book on the market. So that will make at least four generic Perl 6 books this year. Can’t wait to actually have them all in my hands!

Samantha McVey

It is an honour to welcome our latest Perl 6 Core Developer. Looking at her track record so far, one knows that she will do great things in the coming years. Meanwhile, I will try to Keep Calm and Continue Programming.

Core Developments

Samantha McVey continued her outstanding work on Unicode support in MoarVM , which we should see in Perl 6 before long. She implemented the Unicode Collation Algorithm in MoarVM/NQP. She also improved Emoji support as well as handling of many Unicode properties, such as the Bidi_Mirroring_Glyph property.

continued her outstanding work on Unicode support in , which we should see in Perl 6 before long. She implemented the Unicode Collation Algorithm in MoarVM/NQP. She also improved Emoji support as well as handling of many Unicode properties, such as the property. Jonathan Worthington re-implemented the utf8-c8 encoding (the one that tries to interpret the input as UTF-8, but starts creating synthetic codepoints for those byte-sequences that aren’t UTF-8), making sure it will never segfault anymore and will always roundtrip regardless of which garbage is thrown at it. He also made sure that /:ignoremark \"/ now actually works.

re-implemented the encoding (the one that tries to interpret the input as UTF-8, but starts creating synthetic codepoints for those byte-sequences that aren’t UTF-8), making sure it will never segfault anymore and will always roundtrip regardless of which garbage is thrown at it. He also made sure that now actually works. Douglas Jenkins did a lot of work on optimizing IO::Socket::INET .

did a lot of work on optimizing . Christian Bartolomäus again fixed various issues on the JVM backend.

again fixed various issues on the JVM backend. Zoffix Znet worked a lot on combinations , fixing consistency in handling of edge cases. He also worked on .lines and its handling of limits and the handling of Rat with 0 as the denominator. And many other smaller and bigger things.

worked a lot on , fixing consistency in handling of edge cases. He also worked on and its handling of limits and the handling of with as the denominator. And many other smaller and bigger things. Daniel Green worked on the Cursor internals to make them a bit faster: since this affects all regex matching / grammar parsing, we gladly take any improvement in that area.

worked on the internals to make them a bit faster: since this affects all regex matching / grammar parsing, we gladly take any improvement in that area. Elizabeth Mattijsen worked a bit more on sorting, making sorting of 0, 1 and 2 element lists up to 50% faster.

worked a bit more on sorting, making sorting of 0, 1 and 2 element lists up to 50% faster. And many other smaller things, with about 150 commits between the MoarVM, nqp and Rakudo repositories.

Blog Posts

Ecosystem Additions

Quite a nice bunch again this week.

Number::Bytes::Human by Douglas Jenkins .

. Math::Constants by JJ Merelo .

. Sparrowdo Ruby Bundler by Alexey Melezhik .

. Tinky::Hash by Marcel Timmerman.

Winding Down

One could say we’re off to a great start of the New Year! It also appears that everybody in the Perl 6 community still has the same number of fingers and eyes as before all of the New Year’s Eve fireworks. Please check in again next week for your weekly dose of Perl 6 News!