It’s a sad moment in time when you realize that basically all conferences have been cancelled for the foreseeable future: the Perl and Raku Conference in Houston, Perl & Raku Con in Amsterdam to name but a few. Some organizers even came to the conclusion that organizing “in person” events is no longer a viable business model (/r/perl comments).

The Perl Foundation has taken the initiative to organize a Conference in the Cloud in 2020. Thomas Klausner is thinking about more virtual events. Together with Gabor Szabo they will be organizing a Mob Programming session. Time will tell whether this is really a viable alternative, but for now I guess it’s the only alternative that is available to us.

Even more COVID-19 perspectives

In the past week, Andrew Shitov continued adding statistical perspectives to the Covid-19 Observer, and blogged about computing the number of recoveries. And in the meantime still found time to publish Chapter 6 of their compiler book.

In Memoriam

Elizabeth Mattijsen added an “in memoriam” file to the Rakudo distribution, in honour of the contributors who are no longer among us.

Renaming Progress

No noticeable renaming progress this week. Keeping this section in anyway, just for the happy travelling butterfly image! Hoping we will be able to travel soon!

Weekly Challenge

The Raku entries for Challenge #53:

Challenge #54 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

Jonathan Worthington made OnStackReplacement work for frames that have an invokewithcapture in it, and fixed an issue with named parameter validation with regards to possible optimizations. They also made sure that every regex will get its own lexical $/ , solving various edge cases. And standardized the error message on out-of-bounds code points.

in it, and fixed an issue with named parameter validation with regards to possible optimizations. They also made sure that regex will get its own lexical , solving various edge cases. And standardized the error message on out-of-bounds code points. Daniel Green fixed various memory leaks.

Stefan Seifert also did their share fixing potential segfaults and memory leaks related to NativeCall and optimized internal string handling.

and optimized internal string handling. Jan-Olof Hendig spotted a missing break statement, that made some potential optimizations impossible.

Patrick Böker made make clean clean up more in NQP.

clean up more in NQP. Ben Davies fixed various Parameter.raku issues, and removed some unnecessary symbol creation.

issues, and removed some unnecessary symbol creation. And a number of smaller fixes, optimisations and other improvements.

Questions about Raku

Meanwhile on Twitter

Comments about Raku

New Raku Modules

Colorizable by Luis F. Uceta.

Date::Discordian by thundergnat.

Concurrent::PChannel by Vadim Belman.

Today by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Data::Record by Ben Davies.

Updated Raku Modules

P5pack by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Termbox by José Joaquín Atria.

AttrX::Mooish by Vadim Belman.

Math::Libgsl::Matrix by Fernando Santagata.

Path::Router by Sterling Hanenkamp.

Crypt::CAST5 by Ben Davies.

Algorithm::LDA by Itsuki Toyota.

Winding down

It looks like we won’t have a 2020.03 Rakudo Compiler release: some last minute problems may mean that some recent architectural changes will need to be revisited for this implementation of the Raku Programming Language. And in other thoughts: stay safe, stay healthy and may your hacking be educational. See you again next week for another issue of the Rakudo Weekly News!