Andrew Shitov has even been more busy than the past weeks. Apart from adding more and more views to the Covid-19 Observer, so many that there’s now an impressive “What’s new” page. But Andrew didn’t stop at that: an article on Perl.com titled “Observing Coronavirus Pandemic with Raku” (/r/perl comments) explains to the readers how some of the unique features of Raku were applied in processing all of the data. And in the meantime Andrew still found time to publish Chapter 7 of their compiler book.

Building modules with Nix

Chloé Kekoa explains how they developed raku-nix, a bunch of Nix code for building Raku modules, and CRAI, the Comprehensive Raku Archive Index. All to ensure reproducible builds of modules by including permanent archive URLs and cryptographic hashes. Yours truly is looking forward to where this will take the Raku ecosystem!

Thanks for being a friend

Wendy van Dijk just posted an obituary for Jeff Goff.

Renaming Progress

When using the Test module, the PERL6_TEST_DIE_ON_FAIL environment variable can now also be expressed as RAKU_TEST_DIE_ON_FAIL . And the PERL6_TEST_TIME environment variable can now also be expressed as RAKU_TEST_TIME .

Weekly Challenge

The Raku entries for Challenge #54:

Challenge #55 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

Jonathan Worthington generalized the concept of a container descriptor, which should make future optimizations easier to implement.

Christian Bartolomäus fixed a potential segfault in backtraces on MoarVM .

. Daniel Green optimized some NQP internals.

internals. Will Coleda brought the NQP documentation more up-to-date.

documentation more up-to-date. Ben Davies fixed some issues with the Capture class, and made Capture.WHICH 60% and Capture.raku 45% faster.

class, and made 60% and 45% faster. Elizabeth Mattijsen made the sub versions of push / append / shift / prepend about 20x as fast. They also implemented the ^... and ^...^ infix operators, versions of the ... operator that excludes endpoints.

/ / / about 20x as fast. They also implemented the and infix operators, versions of the operator that excludes endpoints. Vadim Belman fixed a problem with dispatchers and the first candidate of a multi .

. And a number of smaller fixes, optimisations and other improvements.

Questions about Raku

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Comments about Raku

New Raku Modules

Date::Calendar::MayaAztec by Jean Forget.

DBIish::Transaction by Rod Taylor.

Interval by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Slang::Nogil by Tinmarino.

Updated Raku Modules

Colorizable by Luis F. Uceta.

Scalar::Util by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Data::Record by Ben Davies.

Term::Choose::Util, Term::Choose by Matthäus Kiem.

Gnome::N, Gnome::Glib, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gdk, Gnome::Gio, Gnome::Gtk3 by Marcel Timmerman.

Termbox by José Joaquín Atria.

Matrix::Client by Matías Linares.

Text::Utils by Tom Browder.

Winding down

Yet another week of lockdown for most people reading this Rakudo Weekly News about the Raku Programming Language. The coming weeks will not be much different for most, so keep on hanging in there! Stay safe, stay healthy, stay helpful. And we’ll see how things look next week. So see you then!