It has been a long time coming, but finally the default branch of Rakudo Perl 6 is no longer called nom (for New Object Model), but called master (which is what most git tools take as the default default). More than 6 years after it became the default branch. For a lot of people involved in the development of Rakudo Perl 6 it almost feels like a rite of passage. Zoffix Znet keeps us up to date on these developments.

Advent Calendar 2017

It’s almost that time of the year again, with just over a month to go: the Rakudo Perl 6 Advent Calendar. Zoffix Znet issued the Call for Authors. Have an idea for a blog post? Don’t wait too long with it: only 15 slots left at the moment of this writing!

Rakudo 2017.10 Released

After a long period of labor, compiler release Rakudo 2017.10 has seen the light after the last showstoppery issues were resolved. The third release that Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev has done in a row! Not too long after that Claudio Ramirez made sure the world knows about the Linux packages he has created from that compiler release.

New Rakudo Star in the works

Steve Mynott tells us that there is now also an RC0 (Release Candidate #0) release of Rakudo Star 2017.10 (draft announcement). An important change with previous versions of Rakudo Star is that panda is no longer shipped because it has been deprecated in favour of zef .

Binary RC0 releases for MacOS (DMG) and 64-bit Windows (MSI) and a new experimental linux cross distro 64 bit build (using AppImage) are also available. The AppImage was built using scripts by Samantha McVey and should work on any recent (3 year old or newer) mainstream Linux distro by setting as executable and running (no installation needed).

Please download and test! Please give any feedback on the #perl6 IRC channel, or create an Issue. It’s hoped the final Rakudo Star 2017.10 release will take place around November 8th.

Squashaton Again!

This week sees the first Saturday of the month, so that means Squashaton time! This time the focus will be on the documentation again, aka the doc repository.

Books, Books, Books!

Andrew Shitov announced a new book “Using Perl 6” for immediate availability. On FaceBook he described it like this:

About a year ago, I decided to write a book about using Perl 6. Later, the plans changed and I published “Perl 6 at a Glance”, after which I wanted to write “Migrating to Perl 6” but instead wrote “Perl 6 Deep Dive” for Packt Publishing. Here and there, I was giving trainings on Perl 5, Python, and JavaScript, and was always suffering from finding a good list of easy tasks that a newcomer can use to train their skills in the language. Finally, I made up the list and solved it in Perl 6. This is the content of “Using Perl 6” — a book with solutions to 100 programming challenges, from simple to intermediate, with explanations of the Perl 6 constructions used. (…) The PDF version can be bought and downloaded already today.

Meanwhile, it became clear that Moritz Lenz has another book planned for late December: Parsing with Perl 6 Regexes and Grammars. I wonder how long it will take before this overview becomes too crowded! Who would have thought that a year ago?

Near Future Of Programming Languages

Stephen Diehl provided an overview last January. Guess which language is missing? Fortunately, some recent comments on Hacker News (this and that) picked up on that.

my %h is Set = ...;

Elizabeth Mattijsen made my %h is Set = <a b c> finally work (of course, also for the other QuantHash types: SetHash , Bag , BagHash , Mix and MixHash ). This can be especially useful for the mutable QuantHash types, as you can now:



my %h is SetHash = (integers from some source);

%h .= grep: *.is-prime; # only keep the prime numbers in %h



And any other action that you would like to do “in place”.

Other Core Developments

Most of the tuits this week were spent on fixing the showstoppery issues that were blocking the release. Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev provided an overview of ticket activity of the past two weeks that more or less reflects that. Other notable developments were:

Zoffix Znet and Elizabeth Mattijsen worked on various aspects of the new ThreadPoolScheduler , focusing on efficiency and stability.

and worked on various aspects of the new , focusing on efficiency and stability. Zoffix Znet solved an issue with multiple initializations of native arrays and an issue that prevented getc from not waiting for a keypress on MacOS.

solved an issue with multiple initializations of native arrays and an issue that prevented from not waiting for a keypress on MacOS. Stefan Seifert continued his work on JIT ting the interface with NativeCall , making the interface between Rakudo Perl 6 and e.g. Inline::Perl5 much more efficient.

continued his work on ting the interface with , making the interface between Rakudo Perl 6 and e.g. much more efficient. And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Blog Posts

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Meanwhile on PerlMonks

Small discoveries VII, Flattening by holli.

Winding Down

As one of the distractions this week, I was looking at Code Golf, which has a lot of entries for Rakudo Perl 6. A good sight to see! Now, if I could only figure out how one can see the actual code samples. Perhaps next week. Join us then for another Perl 6 Weekly!