JJ Merelo, Makoto Nozaki and Mark Keating want you to think about Perl projects for this year’s Google Summer of Code. Please submit your idea(s) and/or let yourself be known as a potential mentor of a project (Facebook, LinkedIn comments). Having a good project accepted can not only help the student or the project, a student may well become another valued core contributor (such as Bart Wiegmans)!

FOSDEM 2019

This weekend will see yet another FOSDEM in Brussels. Unfortunately, there will not a Perl DevRoom this year. But there will be a Perl booth with free swag and Perl books / Perl Wine and stuffed Camelia’s for sale. So please stop by and say hello to the Camel and the Camelia!

A Picky Caller

Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer wrote a blog post about how handy it is being able to introspect the signature of a given pointy block, and use that as a condition on how to process the output of the execution of that block.

Apple Patenting

Ralph Mellor expressed his worries in relation to Perl 6 about Apple patenting certain software practices / algorithms.

Submit your Presentation Proposals!

This is the time of the year where you can submit your talk proposal to multiple Perl events, and be accepted by all of them. In chronological order:

Perl 6 and WebKit

Xliff has posted a gist describing some attempts at interfacing Perl 6 with WebKit to create a browser. Complete with screen shots and code. Exciting stuff!

On the dynamic nature of $_

In the past, the $_ variable (aka the topic), has always internally been marked as a dynamic variable. This poses significant issues in optimizing code, so Jonathan Worthington has been working on making $_ purely lexical (which would allow it to be optimized to a local). This broke a number of modules in the ecosystem, that depend on $_ being accessible dynamically (which are now fixed, at least for the coming release).

It however also broke a core feature of rx// . The associated issue presents some ideas and thoughts about how the regression could be fixed now, while also having a path towards the future that would allow better optimizability. Thoughts / suggestions / fixes are welcome!

Other Core Developments

Ticket status us past week.

Paweł Murias added support for the utf16be encoding on the Javascript and JVM backends.

added support for the encoding on the Javascript and JVM backends. Jonathan Worthington fixed some cases where error reporting would blow up, hiding the original error.

fixed some cases where error reporting would blow up, hiding the original error. Nick Logan fixed a problem with module disambiguation when determining which version of a module to load if no auth information is available.

fixed a problem with module disambiguation when determining which version of a module to load if no information is available. And many other smaller issues were fixed in preparation for the Rakudo 2019.01 Compiler Release.

Questions about Perl 6

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on Facebook

Perl 6 in comments

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

Crypt::CAST5 by Ben Davies .

. Path::Finder by Leon Timmermans.

Updated Modules:

TAP, Getopt::Long, App::Prove6 by Leon Timmermans .

. Path::Router by Sterling Hanenkamp .

. Lumberjack::Dispatcher::Syslog, URI::FetchFile, LibraryCheck, EventSource::Server, Monitor::Monit, FastCGI::NativeCall, Pg::Notify, WebService::Soundcloud, Tinky::JSON, Audio::Sndfile, FastCGI::NativeCall::PSGI, Monitor::Monit, UNIX::Privileges by Jonathan Stowe .

. AttrX::Mooish by Vadim Belman .

. XML::XPath by Martin Barth .

. GTK::Glade by Marcel Timmerman .

. Net::BGP by Joelle Maslak.

Winding down

It was nice to see so many good Perl 6 things happening at the YAPC::Japan, resulting in quite some tweets! And a nice batch of updated and new modules on CPAN. Alas, no Rakudo Compiler Release just yet, but the number of blockers has gone down. More news about Perl 6 and FOSDEM next week!