This week saw the release of Rakudo Star 2016.10, the latest and greatest version of Rakudo Perl 6 for the end-user. Thanks again to Steve Mynott for making this happen! One should also note that after each Rakudo compiler release, Claudio Ramirez makes deb and rpm packages available to the general public.

Performance of Perl 6 string operations over the last year

Cygx created a nice overview of how the performance of string matching has evolved over the past year. The trend is definitely positive, but there is still a lot of work to do!

London Perl Workshop

Neil Bowers points out in a nice blog post that this is the moment for you to submit your Perl 6 presentation for the London Perl Workshop on the 3rd of December. Even if it would be the very first time in your life you would give a presentation!

The Perl 6 Job Market

Julie Bort describes in an interesting article (reddit comments) how being an experienced Perl programmer should ensure you a good paycheck. Combine this with the O’Reilly’s 2016 European Software Development Salary Survey that shows that being proficient in either Perl 5 or Perl 6 gives you an advantage of +$2,636 on a yearly basis (page 28). Interesting stuff, although you need to register before getting the actual report. Mind you, these are statistics, which may or may not apply to you personally.

Incompatible Changes

While Elizabeth Mattijsen worked on optimizing Str.match , it became clear that the :nth adverb handling had some issues. In light of this TimToady indicated how he would like to see it. Basically, :nth will always return as many matches as it can, and non-monotonically increasing indexes (such as :nth(1,4,3,5) will result in an exception being thrown (instead of being silently ignored). This is now implemented.

Other Core Developments

This week, Zoffix Znet looked at a lot of trigonomic edge cases and how they behave in Rakudo Perl 6. So now atanh(1) returns Inf instead of throwing an exception, and ∞ ≅ ∞ returns True instead of False (to name but a few things he worked on). He also fixed the behaviour of Test.pm ‘s is-approx to be more like the old (and deprecated) is_approx test function. Finally, he fixed an issue with SetHash , BagHash and MixHash type objects not correctly autovivifying.

looked at a lot of trigonomic edge cases and how they behave in Rakudo Perl 6. So now returns instead of throwing an exception, and returns instead of (to name but a few things he worked on). He also fixed the behaviour of ‘s to be more like the old (and deprecated) test function. Finally, he fixed an issue with , and type objects not correctly autovivifying. Jonathan Worthington fixed a MoarVM crash in callframe() , a problem when using code blocks in grammar s running in multi-threaded code and a missing close in IO::Path.slurp .

fixed a MoarVM crash in , a problem when using code blocks in s running in multi-threaded code and a missing in . Jimmy Zhuo fixed a recently introduced bug with mkdir() on Windows.

fixed a recently introduced bug with on Windows. Elizabeth Mattijsen introduced support for 3 new Iterator methods: skip-one , skip-at-least and skip-at-least-pull-one . She also finally committed the refactoring of Str.match , which resulted in speed increases of 1.2x to 14x , depending on the mix of named variables given. This also made Str.comb(Regex) about 7x faster.

introduced support for 3 new methods: , and . She also finally committed the refactoring of , which resulted in speed increases of to , depending on the mix of named variables given. This also made about faster. And many other smaller fixes and ameliorations.

Blog Posts

Only one left that wasn’t already mentioned this week.

Ecosystem Additions

Only one this week also. I guess everybody is working on Pull Requests for the Hacktoberfest!

DNS::Zone by Julien Simonet.

Winding Down

An interesting week again with a lot of goodies. And don’t forget, there’s only one week left in October, so be sure to submit your Pull Requests for the HacktoberFest!