This weekend’s Squashathon was the best Squashathon so far: 29 contributors have worked on 276 issues of the 314 issues that were found with modules in the Perl 6 ecosystem. At the moment of this writing, only 24 remained open. Fortunately, many of the issues were uninstalled native library issues. Installing the native library in many of the cases, solved the problem that the ecosystem toaster had found. But other cases were much more problematic and needed a lot of research.

Most of the preparatory work was done by Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev, kudos for that! And kudos to all of the participants, some of who spent many hours trying to figure what it really was that was going wrong with a module, to make the whole ecosystem better.

Marketing Perl 6

Zoffix Znet has put a lot of time and effort into creating marketing materials for Perl 6. In a blog post titled: Introducing: Perl 6 Marketing Assets Web App, he immediately introduced the Perl 6 Marketing Assets Web App. This led to some comments on FaceBook and blogs.perl.org. Yours truly is looking forward to many more Perl 6 marketing materials. Do you have an idea to promote Perl 6? Please be sure to leave an issue in the Perl 6 Marketing Repo!

Rakudo Star 2018.06

Steve Mynott has just announced the Rakudo Star 2018.06 Release, which can now be downloaded. Because there was no 2018.07 Compiler Release of Rakudo, the Rakudo Star release is based on the 2018.06 Rakudo Compiler release.

Small stuff

Jo Christian Oterhals has written another fine blog post about Perl 6: Perl 6 small stuff #4: Why Perl isn’t COBOL nor Python nor Java (or… having fun with Rats). It made a lot of people comment: /r/perl, /r/perl6 and Twitter: #1 and #2. Yours truly can only say: keep up the good work, Jo Christian!

Newcomers Guide To Contributing

Zoffix Znet has written a blog post about the Newcomer Guide to Contributing to Core Perl 6, which introduces a draft version of that guide. Reactions could be found on FaceBook and Twitter!

Comma, a Perl 6 IDE

Jonathan Worthington has had an interview with the people of JetBrains about the Comma IDE, an integrated environment for development and debugging of Perl 6 programs. Comments were found at FaceBook and on Reddit.

Command Line Arguments

Luis has written a nice blog post about the Command line arguments in Perl 6. For some reason, it has been relatively unnoticed (so far). Hopefully, that will change now, as it is a nice introduction into the multitude of possibilities with command line argument handling in Perl 6!

Ping Pong

Brian has started a new blog, with its first article about message passing between threads in Perl 6. Zoffix Znet liked it.

A Long Sad Story

raiph successfully started a discussion about Regexp Ranges and Locales: A Long Sad Story, and how that is still Less Than Awesome in Perl 6.

Migrating Perl 5 code

Elizabeth Mattijsen started a series of 12 articles about the migration of Perl 5 code to Perl 6. This gave rise to comments on Reddit.

Core Developments

Ticket status of last week and the month of July.

Daniel Green fixed a large number of compiler warnings when compiling MoarVM with clang . He also optimized array slices if they consisted of only literal index values, and made Buf.subbuf about 8x as fast.

fixed a large number of compiler warnings when compiling with . He also optimized array slices if they consisted of only literal index values, and made about 8x as fast. Bart Wiegmans finally merged a refactor of a part of the JIT expression engine, on which he’d been working at least 6 months, making it easier for everybody to create JIT templates.

finally merged a refactor of a part of the JIT expression engine, on which he’d been working at least 6 months, making it easier for everybody to create JIT templates. Zoffix Znet cherry-picked and adapted some of his work on the cancelled rationals grant.

cherry-picked and adapted some of his work on the cancelled rationals grant. Tom Browder implemented proper support in Perl 6 pod for =defn definition lists.

implemented proper support in Perl 6 for definition lists. Jonathan Worthington wrote an RFC about possible ways to implement more binary handling primitives in MoarVM and Perl 6. Please leave a comment if you feel you can add to the discussion.

wrote an RFC about possible ways to implement more binary handling primitives in and Perl 6. Please leave a comment if you feel you can add to the discussion. Elizabeth Mattijsen slightly changed the semantics of the set operators that do not return Bool . They will now return a mutable version of the result if the first operand of the set operator was also mutable.

slightly changed the semantics of the set operators that do return . They will now return a mutable version of the result if the first operand of the set operator was also mutable. And many other smaller fixes, optimizations and improvements.

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on FaceBook

Planning to buy “Learning Perl 6” by Zarul Zakuan.

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

Meanwhile on perl6-users

Perl 6 in comments

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

Algorithm::SetUnion by Itsuki Toyota.

Please note that updated modules exclude the modules that are updated, but which are not (yet) on CPAN. CPAN uploads are one place to check, updates to many hundreds of different repositories is something that will need to be automated:

Terminal::Spinners by ryn1x .

. Sparrowdo::VSTS::YAML::Cordova by Alexey Melezhik .

. CamelPub by Don Park .

. Algorithm::LBFGS by Itsuki Toyota .

. ScaleVec by Sam Gillespie .

. AWS::Session, Amazon::DynamoDB, DateTime::DST and Getopt::ForClass by Sterling Hanenkamp .

. IO::Path::Dirstack by Patrick Spek .

. Test::HTTP::Server by Simon Proctor .

. Image::QRCode by Fernando Santagata .

. RDF::Turtle by Brian Duggan .

. Sub::Memoized, P5localtime, P5tie, Time::localtime, Time::gmtime and P5readlink by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Winding Down

Wow again. Hot Stuff. And not only outside!

Next week’s Perl 6 Weekly might come a little later, possibly on Tuesday, because yours truly will have been busy giving the Making your Perl 5 Modules work in Rakudo Perl 6 workshop at The Perl Conference in Glasgow on Monday. Which, through an unfortunate planning situation, runs in parallel with Jeff Goff‘s ‎Introduction to Perl 6 workshop. Both of which still have seats available (hint, hint!).

See you sometime next week for more news from the exciting world of Perl 6!