Welcome to the first issue of the Rakudo Weekly, formerly known as the Perl 6 Weekly. It continues the tradition of weekly news about the development of Rakudo, an implementation of the Raku Programming Language. Please see About for more background on this incarnation of this weekly blog.

More video tutorials

Yanzhan Yang has not been deterred by the name change. He published 8 more video tutorials, now about Raku:

More videos

Phasers to Stunning by Simon Proctor.

Reports on renaming

Nightmare

Tyler Limkemann describes a disturbing case of truth-bending in A Logician’s Exceptional Nightmare. Enter at your own risk.

Andrew Shitov

This week also has been a busy week for Andrew Shitov: he started a discussion about how Raku can attract business users, and he published his second Raku book called Raku One-Liners, which is also available as a free download.

DCBPW

In the DC / Baltimore area, another rename has taken place: DC Baltimore Perlyglot Workshop 2020 on 18/19 April 2020 at John Hopkins University. Raku presentations are welcome and can already be submitted!

Meta-programming Book

Ben Davies is running a Twitter poll trying to find out whether there is any interest in a book about the ins and outs of metaprogramming with Rakudo.

Weekly Challenge

Another thing that continues, is of course the Weekly Challenge. With these Raku entries this week for Challenge #30:

Of course, Challenge #31 is up for your perusal!

Core Developments

Two weeks worth of developments:

Patrick Bröker added Unicode path support on Windows. He also made sure that root thinks it can always read / write / execute files. And added a BuildTools assistant for the MSVC compiler.

thinks it can always read / write / execute files. And added a BuildTools assistant for the MSVC compiler. Stefan Seifert added logic to allow introspection into NativeCall call sites, e.g. to check whether the library has been loaded and whether the JIT has compiled a function body for it. He also fixed a problem with native sub repossession in compiled modules. And an access to freed memory in guard handling. And a file descriptor leak in precompilation.

call sites, e.g. to check whether the library has been loaded and whether the JIT has compiled a function body for it. He also fixed a problem with native sub repossession in compiled modules. And an access to freed memory in guard handling. And a file descriptor leak in precompilation. Ben Davies added concreteness checks on many array ops.

Jan-Olof Hendig fixed an issue that would create havoc if a Garbage Collection would happen during the setting up an asynchronous connection. He also made sure libuv 1.33.0 will be used.

will be used. Bart Wiegmans added additional version of the let keyword in the JIT to indicate a specific result type, since the type might be obscured by macros otherwise.

keyword in the JIT to indicate a specific result type, since the type might be obscured by macros otherwise. Nick Logan fixed a deadlock that was triggered by zef in Continuous Integration.

in Continuous Integration. Paweł Murias fixed some issues on the Javascript backend.

Naoum Hankache pointed out that on Windows, the REPL should be exited with ^Z , and adapted the associated message accordingly.

should be exited with , and adapted the associated message accordingly. Vadim Belman fixed the build on OpenBSD .

. Nele Schwarz fixed a problem in the build template for the JVM backend.

Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev did some of the initial textual changes to move to Raku.

And many smaller fixes and additions.

Questions about Raku

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on Facebook

Alas, the Perl 6 Facebook group has still not been renamed back, so deeplinks will break soon. So, if you’re interested in developments there, please navigate from the Perl 6 group homepage.

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Comments about Raku

New Raku Modules

Pakku by Haytham Elganiny.

Updated Raku Modules

Algorithm::LibSVM by Itsuki Toyota.

Net::IP by Tom Browder.

Gnome::Gdk3, Gnome::Glib, Gnome::GObject, Gnome::Gtk3, Gnome::N, Gnome::Gtk3::Glade, XML::Actions by Marcel Timmerman.

Tomtit by Alexey Melezhik.

Red by Fernando Corrêa de Oliveira.

LibXML, LibXSLT by David Warring.

Inline::Perl5 by Stefan Seifert.

ORM::ActiveRecord by Greg Donald.

Failable by Ben Davies.

Prometheus::Client by Sterling Hanenkamp.

Winding down

Hope you like the new home for this weekly blog. The past week was filled with a lot of conflicting emotions after the decision to rename Perl 6 to Raku. It will take quite some time for everybody to get used to the new name, and the territory that comes with it. In any case, it was good to see a lot of new names on the new #raku IRC channel on Freenode. So, see you again next week for more news about the Raku Programming Language and Rakudo!