Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi made all of the interviews he has done for the (Russian language) Pragmatic Perl website from 2013 to 2015 available in English as a single PDF for easy offline reading (Reddit comments). Although the interviews are at least 2 years old, they still feel very up-to-date. Of the 17 interviewees, these 10 had something to say about Perl 6: Sawyer X, Stevan Little, chromatic, Marc Lehmann, Tokuhiro Matsuno, Randal Schwartz, Ricardo Signes, Renée Bäcker, David Golden and Philippe Bruhat. A very interesting (at 120+ pages maybe long) read! Kudos to Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi!

Rakudo Perl 6 in Alpine

Rakudo Perl 6 is now part of the Alpine Linux distribution in edge/testing. Another step towards easy availability of Rakudo Perl 6 in the Linux world!

Performance Analysis Tooling

Timo Paulssen was finally able to start on his Rakudo Perl 6 Performance Analysis Tooling Grant. So now running your asynchronous code with --profile will produce some real results! He describes the progress in a blog post titled Delays and Delights.

Curating And Improving Perl 6 documentation

The TPF Grants Committee has approved JJ Merelo’s grant proposal for improving the Perl 6 documentation. Can’t wait to see the improvements to documentation that it will bring us!

Polishing Rationals

Zoffix Znet created a proposal to make Rationals work better in Rakudo Perl 6. Apart from making Rat ionals more consistent, he also expects to see some performance gains as well! And to make this all happen sooner rather than later, he drafted a Grant Proposal for the next round of TPF grants.

Other Core Developments

Ticket status of past week.

Jonathan Worthington changed the extension of the setting files from .pm to .pm6 to follow the advice of the documentation.

changed the extension of the setting files from to to follow the advice of the documentation. TimToady decided that say() will not autothread. This after a long discussion on whether it should or not.

decided that will not autothread. This after a long discussion on whether it should or not. Zoffix Znet made Num.Bool about 9x faster. He also fixed a scoping issue with Block s in regexes, and fixed .grep on HyperSeq / RaceSeq . But that’s not it yet: he also fixed an issue with NativeCall and precompiled modules.

made Num.Bool about 9x faster. He also fixed a scoping issue with s in regexes, and fixed on / . But that’s not it yet: he also fixed an issue with and precompiled modules. Christian Bartolomäus again fixed various old and new issues specific to the JVM backend.

again fixed various old and new issues specific to the JVM backend. Elizabeth Mattijsen changed substr() to be a frontend to Str.substr , instead of vice-versa. She also made substr() upto 1.5x and Str.substr upto 3x faster. She did the same with substr-rw , which only got upto 20%/30% faster. She also made sure that Unicode aliases of several operators ( ≤ , ≠ , ≥ and − ) are now just as fast as their ASCII counterparts.

changed to be a frontend to , instead of vice-versa. She also made upto 1.5x and upto 3x faster. She did the same with , which only got upto 20%/30% faster. She also made sure that Unicode aliases of several operators ( , , and ) are now just as fast as their ASCII counterparts. And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Blog Posts

Meanwhile in StackOverflow

Meanwhile in Twitter

Meanwhile on perl6-users

I need help with NativeCall by ToddAndMargo.

Meanwhile on PerlMonks

RFC: system calls on Unicode filesystem by daxim.

Perl 6 in comments

Winding Down

The weather has turned from record breaking cold for the time of the year, to a nice spring. In the matter of a day! Feels to me we’re going to see some exciting budding buds in the coming weeks, if the weather is any indication. So please check in again next week for more budding!