The Perl Conference (aka YAPC North America, or YAPC::NA) will be upon us in less than a week. A Q&A Session with Larry Wall will be hosted by D Ruth Bavousett. If you want to know the answer to a burning question you’ve always wanted to ask Larry, you can still add your question. So don’t be shy!

On the Wednesday, there will be a Pull Request Challenge where at least Tom Browder and yours truly will be around to hack or help you hack on Perl 6 and/or the ecosystem.

Meanwhile on /.

As it turns out, Larry will be answering even more questions, namely also on Slashdot. Although I must admit, I find the questions put there so far, to really be below par. 😦 Also check out the Reddit comments.

London PM Technical Meeting

The next London PM Technical Meeting on 15 June, will have a Perl 6 related talk by Nigel Hamilton titled “SixFix – a Weekly Dose of Perl 6 Powered by Perl 5”. Check it out if you’re in the neighbourhood!

Core Developments

Zoffix Znet did some excellent work on the is-approx test function from Test . Check out the extensive description.

did some excellent work on the test function from . Check out the extensive description. Daniel Green noticed that a lot of occurrences in the settings where iterators are involved, used to store the result in a temporary variable to stop it from being sunk. It turned out that many of them were not necessary, so they were removed.

noticed that a lot of occurrences in the settings where iterators are involved, used to store the result in a temporary variable to stop it from being sunk. It turned out that many of them were not necessary, so they were removed. Stefan Seifert fixed a problem with pre-compilation on filesystems with coarse timestamps.

fixed a problem with pre-compilation on filesystems with coarse timestamps. Tobias Leich fixed a problem with the storage of reverse dependencies of installed modules.

fixed a problem with the storage of reverse dependencies of installed modules. Daniel Green fixed a problem with non-ascii numerals not being accepted in the :16times Pair format.

fixed a problem with non-ascii numerals not being accepted in the format. TimToady removed a warning when creating an Enum from a Range .

removed a warning when creating an from a . Brad Gilbert spotted and fixed a problem with eqv on Match objects.

spotted and fixed a problem with on objects. Salvador Ortiz suggested passing on Failure s from custom BUILD methods in a class, instead of throwing them. This has now been implemented but still pending approval of TimToady .

suggested passing on s from custom methods in a class, instead of throwing them. This has now been implemented but still pending approval of . More of the REPL has been moved from nqp to Perl 6 level, thanks to Brock Wilcox .

has been moved from to level, thanks to . Quite some optimisations were done by Elizabeth Mattijsen , such as: .map between 10% and 30% faster. .unique , .repeated and .squish 10% to 20% faster. gather / take about 10% faster. basic object creation (using either .new or .bless ) now up to 3x faster. one-arg ( +@a ) and slurpy signature ( *@a ) and ( **@a ) handling between 20% and 4x faster. and many other more minor optimisations, which you may or may not notice in your code. The results of these optimisations in the past week are very visible in the Text::CSV performance graph kept by H. Merijn Brand : for the first time, the benchmark dropped below 10 seconds, down from 256 seconds from the first benchmark in October 2014!

, such as:

Blog Posts

Ecosystem Additions

Feels like everybody is preparing their presentations, instead of adding modules!

Gems from the backlog

Culled from the period 1 to 6 June.

Winding Down

Next week’s Perl 6 Weekly will come from TPC, barring unforeseen circumstances.