Samantha McVey and Bart Wiegmans have been responsible for speeding up one of the real world speed tests by 6% in the past week (without making any changes to the code of the speed test itself). Samantha‘s part was making hash lookups and setting them 15% faster and some cases of looking up strings in a haystack up to 16x faster. Bart added JIT templates for quite a few opcodes that were used by the real world speed test.

Rakudo Star 2018.04

Steve Mynott has released Rakudo Star 2018.04, the recommended production-ready version of Rakudo Perl 6 for end-users. It contains all of the improvements of MoarVM / NQP and Rakudo of the past three months. Available as a source distribution, but also as directly installable Windows (64bit) and MacOS binary distributions. Pre-compiled Linux packages are also available, maintained by Claudio Ramirez.

Perl 6 syntax support on Github

With the merging of Add Pod 6 to the languages.yml Pull Request by Patrick Spek, we’re one step closer to having Github support Perl 6 pod. Alas, the final step(s) have not been taken yet. To be continued and concluded shortly, hopefully 🙂

Monthly Squashathon

Last Saturday saw the Monthly Squashathon, this time with the emphasis on the Perl 6 Documentation. Granada Perl Mongers played a large part in this: JJ Merelo described how you could help. All in all a very successful Squashathon, especially in Granada!

San Francisco Meetup

Last Sunday saw a Perl 6 Meetup in San Francisco. Alas, only 2 people attended, but starting a new regular meetup is always difficult. Keep up the good work!

Core Developments

Ticket status of past week and past month.

Stefan Seifert fixed a large number of sleeper issues caused by recent hash randomization changes, that would cause irreproducible builds, that would in turn cause many weird issues (especially for core developers).

fixed a large number of sleeper issues caused by recent hash randomization changes, that would cause irreproducible builds, that would in turn cause many weird issues (especially for core developers). Timo Paulssen fixed a problem in a helper function for P6Opaque debugging and made sure that allocations made for autoboxing a native will no longer be lost. He also fixed a long-standing issue with <after> and left/right word boundary checking.

fixed a problem in a helper function for debugging and made sure that allocations made for autoboxing a native will no longer be lost. He also fixed a long-standing issue with and left/right word boundary checking. Christian Bartolomäus fixed various issues with the numification of literals on the JVM backend.

fixed various issues with the numification of literals on the JVM backend. Paweł Murias fixed some issues with longest literal ordering in NFA matching on the JS and JVM backends.

fixed some issues with longest literal ordering in NFA matching on the JS and JVM backends. And many other smaller fixes and optimizations.

Meanwhile on Twitter

Blog Posts

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

Now more than 666 Perl 6 questions! Onwards to a 1000! Not surprising if you see the graph of the number of StackOverflow questions per quarter: last quarter saw the highest number of Perl 6 questions yet!

Here’s last week’s batch:

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Perl 6 in comments

Rational arithmetic by default by Brent Laabs .

. Threading differences by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

P5getpwnam, P5getgrnam, P5getnetbyname, P5getservbyname, P5getprotobyname, P5__FILE__, P5print, P5getpriority, P5rand, P5reset, P5defined by Elizabeth Mattijsen for the CPAN Butterfly Plan.

Updated Modules:

Chart::Gnuplot by Itsuki Toyota .

. Font::FreeType by David Warring .

. DBIx::NamedQueries by Mario Zieschang .

. IO::Socket::Async::SSL by Jonathan Worthington .

. P5builtins by Elizabeth Mattijsen .

. App::Mi6 by Shoichi Kaji.

Winding Down

One StackOverflow comment in the past week made yours truly smile very much:

.oO ( Python’s Py3 Plan vs Perl’s Butterfly Plan. A Python community cabal built an unsafe conventional nuclear reactor next door to their old wind power plant. They’ve now condemned the old plant and scheduled it for official demolition in 2020 even though it’s still windy. Meanwhile, after years of arguing about the future of power, with one Perl sub-community maintaining their old solar power plant and another building a LFTR thorium reactor (safe but currently mostly misunderstood or ignored), some friends of both communities have built cabling that allows power to be shared between the two plants. )

And with that smile I hope to see you all again next week for more Perl 6 news!