It was a fruitful week. We saw the release of Rakudo Star 2017.07 thanks to Steve Mynott. Apart from a source version, there are also packages for CentOS, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu (thanks to Claudio Ramirez), as well as packages for MacOS and Win64 (thanks to Steve Mynott again). And we had a new ecosystem addition for each day of the week. And the hard copy version of Perl 6 Fundamentals by Moritz Lenz is hitting the bookshelves!

The Perl Conference in Amsterdam

The schedule is now published! In other news, the conference Wiki is being fleshed out. Specific entries of importance are:

EPO Hackathon – if you want to hack on EPO

Share a Room – if you want to share a room with someone else to reduce cost

Volunteers – if you would like to assist the organizers

Be A Tourist – useful pointers for touristing in Amsterdam

And you can still register!

Blog Posts

Core Developments

Jonathan Worthington continued working on the first step of his overhaul of the MoarVM dynamic optimizer, which optimizes hot code based on collected type information. He now has a branch with optimization and JIT compilation running on a background thread rather than interrupting code, and a new means of data collection that will allow for smarter optimization decisions in the future. Along the way, he has fixed a range of optimization bugs that existed prior to these changes and which were driven out by stresstesting. With everything working again, he will now switch to tuning it ahead of a merge. Finally, he also fixed native callbacks on threads other than the one that provided them in the first place.

continued working on the first step of his overhaul of the dynamic optimizer, which optimizes hot code based on collected type information. He now has a branch with optimization and JIT compilation running on a background thread rather than interrupting code, and a new means of data collection that will allow for smarter optimization decisions in the future. Along the way, he has fixed a range of optimization bugs that existed prior to these changes and which were driven out by stresstesting. With everything working again, he will now switch to tuning it ahead of a merge. Finally, he also fixed native callbacks on threads other than the one that provided them in the first place. Samantha McVey worked a lot on optimizing concatenation of strings on the MoarVM backend, fixing several bugs along the way.

worked a lot on optimizing concatenation of strings on the backend, fixing several bugs along the way. Gerd Pokorra added a --libdir parameter to the configuration of Rakudo Perl 6.

added a parameter to the configuration of Rakudo Perl 6. Elizabeth Mattijsen made the various stringifications (aka .Str , .gist and .perl ) on QuantHashes (aka Set , Bag and Mix ) up to 2x faster. Also, the output of .gist is now sorted. She also worked on Bag | Mix.roll making them upto 2x faster, and fixed a bug in Array.join , which ignored the is default setting of the Array on values :delete d from the Array .

made the various stringifications (aka , and ) on (aka , and ) up to 2x faster. Also, the output of is now sorted. She also worked on | making them upto 2x faster, and fixed a bug in , which ignored the setting of the on values d from the . Nick Logan made sure that :ver will be treated as a literal Version , rather than as a string. So that use Test:ver is now completely synonymous with use Test:ver(v6.*) .

made sure that will be treated as a literal , rather than as a string. So that is now completely synonymous with . Zoffix Znet improved the TODO test handling inside TODO ed subtests.

improved the test handling inside ed subtests. Stefan Seifert fixed --ll-exception , which was sadly broken (and got into the 2017.07 release unnoticed).

fixed , which was sadly broken (and got into the 2017.07 release unnoticed). Timo Paulssen made sure that the installation of Rakudo Perl 6 will not cause execution errors in a script that is running the previous version of Rakudo Perl 6 at the same time.

made sure that the installation of Rakudo Perl 6 will not cause execution errors in a script that is running the previous version of Rakudo Perl 6 at the same time. And several other improvements and bugfixes.

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Ecosystem Additions

Swedish::TextDates_sv by svekenfur .

. Text::MiscUtils by Geoffrey Broadwell .

. Grammar::Modelica by albastev .

. Sparky by Alexey Melezhik .

. YAML::Parser::LibYAML by Tony O’Dell .

. 6pm by Fernando Correa de Oliveira .

. Object::Container by moznion.

Winding Down

Ah, looking forward to next week when we will have many more fruity bits. Hope to see you again, then!