The past weeks we’ve seen quite a few nice Perl 6 related blog posts. Just in case you haven’t seen them, I would like to repeat them here for you:

The Annotated Berlin Consensus

At the 2015 QAH in Berlin, a consensus was reached on a number of Perl toolchain issues, with a particular focus on governance and recommended standards of care for CPAN authors. The official version in Markdown can be found on Github. David Golden also blogged an annotated version of it. Although one could argue this is not strictly Perl 6 related, all of the issues mentioned in the consensus, will come to the Perl 6 ecosystem sooner or later.

Advancing the MoarVM JIT

This grant proposal by Bart Wiegmans (brrt) has been accepted. This is great news, can’t wait for bare Rakudo startup time to drop below 0.05 seconds!

Bare startup time below 0.1 second

In the past week, the bare startup of Rakudo on MoarVM finally dropped below 100 milliseconds on most developers’ machines. This is now only a factor of 20 slower than Perl 5. However, I’m told that starting Perl 5 with Moose (which from a feature point of view, gets it closer to Perl 6), is now slower than starting Rakudo!

Dresden

We also had the 2015.05 compiler release of Rakudo, named Dresden (after the recent German Perl Workshop there). The list of changes is quite extensive, coming in at 370 commits since the last release.

Changes since the Dresden release

use trace : lexical pragma to trace program execution on STDERR

: lexical pragma to trace program execution on STDERR Empty IO::Path / “”.IO no longer allowed, it used to be equivalent to “.”

GLR underway, watch your modules!

One can say that the GLR (Great List Refactor) is now really underway. Several modules in the ecosystem are now known to fail because of GLR induced changes. If you have a module in the Perl 6 ecosystem, it would be nice if you could check it for GLR induced bitrot using the latest Rakudo!

Shutting down

This Perl 6 Weekly came in a little late. Hopefully, future Perl 6 Weeklies will come in a more timely manner. Until then, keep up the good work!