With a pollen-rich environment this time of year in the Northern hemisphere, it is to be expected that some cross-pollination will take place. In an unexpected twist, the question “What are some features new to Perl 6 that should be adopted by other languages?” created some interesting answers on Quora and Reddit. Which then gave rise to the more expected question “What feature in another language would you like to see adopted in Perl 6?” with equally interesting answers.

New Marketing Poster

Zoffix Znet has created a thought provoking marketing poster in the Perl 6 Marketing repository (FaceBook comments). It references Paul Graham‘s concept of a hundred year programming language. A quote from this blog post of 2003:

There are some stunningly novel ideas in Perl, for example. Many are stunningly bad, but that’s always true of ambitious efforts. At its current rate of mutation, God knows what Perl might evolve into in a hundred years.

To which yours truly can only add with 20/20 hindsight: I think we’ve had most of the “stunningly bad ideas” in Perl 6 by now.

Cancellation

Zoffix Znet announced in his blog post titled “Cancellation of Perl 6 Constants and Rationals Grant that he will cease working on the “Bugfixing and Performance of Rationals Fixing Constraints on Constants grant.

In conclusion, I believe were this grant to be completed, the result would differ significantly from what was voted on during grant’s proposal. For that reason, I wish to cancel it.

Yours truly would like to thank Zoffix Znet for all the (now volunteer) work that he has put into this.

Core Developments

Ticket status of last week.

Potential breaking change: the is required trait does not make sense on private attributes in a class because private attributes will never be assigned by the default object building logic (aka .new ). To avoid confusion, adding is required to a private attribute is now a compilation error.

trait does not make sense on private attributes in a class because private attributes will never be assigned by the default object building logic (aka ). To avoid confusion, adding to a private attribute is now a compilation error. Jonathan Worthington did an enormous amount of work on providing the prerequisites for the next round of speeding up Rakudo Perl 6, and Timo Paulssen helped him with this. Unfortunately, this also meant some ecosystem breakage that is in process of getting fixed. Hopefully all of this will be summarized in a soon to be published blogpost.

did an enormous amount of work on providing the prerequisites for the next round of speeding up Rakudo Perl 6, and helped him with this. Unfortunately, this also meant some ecosystem breakage that is in process of getting fixed. Hopefully all of this will be summarized in a soon to be published blogpost. Samantha McVey continued her work on low-level hashes in MoarVM, now using a SipHash based algorithm. While doing this, she also managed to reduce the memory usage of each key in every hash by 8 bytes.

continued her work on low-level hashes in MoarVM, now using a SipHash based algorithm. While doing this, she also managed to reduce the memory usage of each key in every hash by 8 bytes. Zoffix Znet fixed several issues regarding the initialization of decoders in IO::Handle , and the immutability of the result of Proc.command . He also did a lot of preparation work for the future 6.d language version.

fixed several issues regarding the initialization of decoders in , and the immutability of the result of . He also did a lot of preparation work for the future language version. Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev focused on various issues with regards to the installation of Rakudo.

focused on various issues with regards to the installation of Rakudo. Daniel Green fixed an issue with regards to decontainerization of != .

fixed an issue with regards to decontainerization of . Elizabeth Mattijsen fixed an issue with concatenation of two Junction s. She also improved the speed of .sum on native integer arrays (1.2x as fast normally, 35x as fast with the new :wrap named parameter) and improved the immutability of Map while making initalization of a Map between 1.5x and 4x as fast.

fixed an issue with concatenation of two s. She also improved the speed of on native integer arrays (1.2x as fast normally, 35x as fast with the new named parameter) and improved the immutability of while making initalization of a between 1.5x and 4x as fast. And many other smaller fixes and improvements.

Meanwhile on Twitter

Meanwhile on FaceBook

Meanwhile on StackOverflow

Meanwhile on perl6-users

An interesting math formula to share by ToddAndMargo.

Perl 6 in comments

Perl 6 Modules

New Modules:

App::Lang::French::VerbTrainer by Zoffix Znet .

. Version::Semantic by Patrick::Spek .

. Image::Libexif by Fernando Santagata .

. Tuple by Elizabeth Mattijsen.

Updated Modules:

Readline by Jeff Goff .

. Dist::Helper by Patrick Spek .

. DOM::Tiny and AWS::Session by Sterling Hanenkamp .

. Sys::Hostname and P5substr by Elizabeth Mattijsen .

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

. P6Repl::Helper by Jack Kuan .

. PDF::Class by David Warring.

Winding Down

On the hottest day of the year (so far), it was quite a job again to get the Perl 6 Weekly together. So much happening! Yours truly hopes to be able to keep this up until next week. See you then!