The Perl 6 Weekly has been renamed to the Rakudo Weekly and can be found at: https://rakudoweekly.blog.
Thank you for visiting the Perl 6 Weekly the past years. It was a blast!
Please adjust your RSS readers, email notifications. Thank you!
Hope to see you there!
Larry Wall emerged, almost like a deus ex machina, to give his approval of changing the name of the Perl 6 Programming Language to “Raku”. This stirred up quite some reactions on the interwebs:
Also see quite some reactions on Twitter below.
Next weekend, on Saturday 19 October, it’s time for the London Perl Workshop again. The following presentations with Perl 6 content appear to have been planned:
App::MI6 by Simon Proctor.An excellent opportunity to learn more about Perl 6 / Raku. And possibly the last time for a pre-Brexit visit to the UK!
Yanzhan Yang, a serial tech video uploader, yet again has posted more Perl 6 introductory videos on YouTube:
Getting more amazing every week!
It was a stressful week for Andrew Shitov: at first he was worried about the future of his Perl 6 compiler book. Then, after Larry Wall showed his approval of the renaming, he suggested having a RakuCon in May 2020 on Cyprus at the venue previously intended for the 2020 Perl Conference. Quickly followed by a blog post explaining how he sees the future of Raku, including building a new, faster Raku compiler (/r/perl6 comments). Followed by the publication of the first Raku book: Using Raku and making that available for free download (/r/perl6 comments). And to top it off, produced a little tutorial about the difference between is rw and is raw. Yours truly can only hope that future weeks will be less stressful.
Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #29:
Challenge #30 is up for your perusal.
reduce function and reduction metaoperator give different results by Romario.Grammar regexes match independently but not together by Holli.Cool by neりkeshi.say and .say by asari.-11? by しーある.#perl5 by Mohammad S Anwar.await without async by Timo Paulssen.Thanks to the quickly unrepairable actions of a certain individual outside of the Perl 6 community, the Perl 6 Facebook group has changed all of its URLs and/or is only accessible to people with Facebook logins. And since it is the intention of changing back to the original URLs (which will most likely take a month thanks to Facebook policies), it doesn’t seem to make sense to put deep links here now.
So, if you’re interested in happenings on Facebook, check out the Perl 6 Group, and navigate from there.
any() junction and user-defined $_ topicvariable by William Michels.New modules:
Updated modules:
The past year has been very stressful for yours truly. And the past week even more so. Some stress will remain in the near future, but it looks like stress levels will be allowed to go down in the further future, with “Perl” and “Raku” each going their own way.
This is the last Perl 6 Weekly that yours truly will write. Next week I will just announce the location of the new Rakudo Weekly blog here.
Why “Rakudo” and not “Raku”, you might ask? Well, originally the “Perl 6 Weekly” was about all implementations of Perl 6. But for the past 4 years, it has effectively been only about the “Rakudo” implementation. Now that “Perl 6” is being renamed to “Raku”, it seems like a good opportunity to not squat on the language name in a blog that is effectively dedicated to a single implementation of the Raku Programming Language.
So see you next week for directions to the new blog!
JJ Merelo is the proud writer of the latest Perl 6 book: Perl 6 Quick Syntax Reference: A Pocket Guide to the Language, the Core Modules, and the Community. A book packed with useful information and a must-have for any developer new to Perl 6. Highly recommended! (Safari).
Sterling Hanenkamp shows how to use a sub as a method (/r/perl6 comments).
Greg Donald has published two blog posts in the past week: a personal one about his perspective as an outsider, and a technical one about adding an attribute to a class at runtime.
Yanzhan Yang, a serial tech video uploader, yet again has posted more Perl 6 introductory videos on YouTube:
Getting more amazing every week!
Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #28:
Challenge #29 is up for your perusal.
Buf.write- methods return the invocant, for easier chaining. And added support for calling these methods on Buf type objects, for easier creation of Bufs from scratch.each method on sequences? by Sean.push, or not… by ozzy.PATH in Azure pipelines by Suman Khanal.DateTime makes it easier by Joelle Maslak.push / pop by 八雲アナグラ.Intl::Date thoughts by Matthew Stephen Stuckwisch.New modules:
Updated modules:
A quiet week, with one more week to go on voting on the rename of Perl 6. See you all next week with more news about the Perl 6 Programming Language!
Jonathan Worthington explains why he got a lump in his throat when he approved changing the name of “Perl 6” to “Raku”. Feelings that yours truly (like many others) only can share. (/r/perl, /r/perl6 comments). Andrew Shitov also shared his feelings about renaming the Perl 6 Programming Language (/r/perl6, Facebook comments).
Yanzhan Yang, a serial tech video uploader, has posted some more Perl 6 introductory videos on YouTube:
Amazing!
Tony O’Dell has created a walk through on how to do Continuous Integration with Circle CI and Travis CI, using a Docker image.
Shred_Alert describes the magic of base.
Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #27:
Simon Proctor is the champion of week 27! And as usual, Challenge #28 is up for your perusal.
Proxy, allowing one to more easily create custom containers. And she sped up a lot of Cool methods.FALLBACK? by Greg Donald.zef --verbose install Inline::Perl5, install fails by keegjk1.Proxy object for a hash? by Greg Donald.gather be used to unroll Junctions? by JJ Merelo.Failure failing in CATCH by Holli.~~ instead of =~ by Regular Expression.Junctions? by JJ Merelo.$x₁ not valid by Joelle Maslak.[+] lines? by Marc Chantreux.$*ARGFILES and MAIN by Marc Chantreux.New modules:
Updated modules:
It appears there will be no Rakudo 2019.09 compiler release. Which makes sense since it’s almost October. Check out the Perl 6 Weekly next week for more news about this and many other things!
Damian Conway had an itch, and he scratched it in “Itch.scratch()“. An extensive treatise on how to extend the Perl 6 Programming Language, giving the for loop an else block to be executed only if no iterations were done in the for loop. In less than 25 lines! (Reddit comments).
Yanzhan Yang has posted a number of Perl 6 introductory videos on YouTube, maybe the first of many to come:
Yanzhan Yang appears to be a serial tech video uploader (Reddit comments).
Steve Roe explains his thoughts on seamlessly supporting atomic units in the Physics::Measure Perl 6 module.
These presentations about Perl 6 are currently planned to be given at the next London Perl Workshop:
It’s not too late to submit your presentation!
The Perl Foundation is nominating Pete Krawczyk as Treasurer. Many thanks to Dan Wright for having filled this position for so many years.
And there is a grant proposal for curating the Perl 6 documentation, a continuation of earlier work by JJ Merelo.
Please leave your comments, if you have any of course!
Sven Gregori investigated several open source projects with naming issues, Perl 6 just being one of them (/r/perl, /r/perl6 comments).
Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #26:
Yet Ebreo is the champion of week 25! And as usual, Challenge #27 is up for your perusal.
CStr REPR’s copy_to function.--nqp-home and --perl6-home configuration options.CATCH and throw in custom exception by Shniperson.tie by Holli.used modules in Comma by Jonathan Worthington.grammar rules by The Perl Shop.New modules (some of them were missed previously because of not having been uploaded to CPAN):
Updated modules:
A quiet week yet again, while work has started on finalizing the next Rakudo compiler release. Hope to be able to report on that next week. Until then, program safely and have fun!
Timo Paulssen published a report about his work on the MoarVM Heap Snapshot Profiler of the past months. This is an excellent tool that is already being used by MoarVM / Rakudo core developers to track resource usage in Perl 6 programs. Glad to see such progress!
Sterling Hanenkamp delved into the specifics of the is export trait (Reddit comments).
Andrew Shitov has made his book “Using Perl 6” available for online perusing (Reddit comments).
Bart Wiegmans presented his (for now) Final Grant Report on the MoarVM JIT Compiler Expression Backend Maturation grant. Too bad not all goals were met, but in general everybody is happy with the progress.
Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #25:
Challenge #26 is up for your perusal.
Developments of the past 3 weeks:
break statement in MoarVM with Coverity.MVM_HASH_RANDOMIZE=0 that really no hash randomization will occur. And fixed issues with exception propagation in threaded programs and external programs segfaulting.clang warnings.Promises.get_value method in TWEAK by Mark Devine.New modules:
Updated modules:
A week with a lot less happening for yours truly. Meanwhile, developments on the build system are simply staggering. As well as stability improvements. Looking forward to reporting more of these next week!
With a tweet, Curtis “Ovid” Poe made it known to the world that he had written up his view on the proposal to rename Perl 6. And from then, it went sort of viral in the IT community with comments / mentions in: Hacker News, /r/perl, /r/perl6, PerlMonks, The Register, Lobsters, Slashdot, Developpez (French), Heise (German), Opennet (Russian), Blognone (Thai), I-Programmer, Technologik (French), SD Times, Packt. And probably many more places.
Meanwhile, the associated Pull Request is almost ready for the voting procedure.
Less than a week left to come up with your Grant Proposals for the September 2019 round of grants from The Perl Foundation.
Last weekend saw a squashathon dedicated to helping with documention of Red (a Perl 6 ORM). The squashathon was a success in setting up the documentation for Red, and the winner is Xliff!
Somehow, ZhongnianTao‘s blogpost about implementing the GB2312, has fallen through the cracks. Still a good read about the complexities of this mapping!
A very extensive treatise about the length of emoji’s by Henri Sivonen: it mentions Perl 6. It’s a long read, but should give you an appreciation about the torture that Perl 6 developers have gone through to give you grapheme support.
Aaron Sherman elaborated on calculating e with a Sigma class and some more magic, allowing 1 + Σ(1, ∞, 1∕*!) to actually work!
Aaron Sherman also started a tutorial about closures in Perl 6.
Andrew Shitov also mentioned that 42 can be expressed as the sum of three cubes. Which, contrary to many other programming languages, works out of the box with the Perl 6 Programming Language.
Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #23:
Damian Conway published a blog titled “To compute a constant of calculus (A treatise on multiple ways) in response to challenge #21.
Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #24:
Challenge #25 is up for your perusal.
Will be catching up on this next week.
.dist-id by hythm.Promise.in with infinite time? by drclaw.$ instead of $_ for the topic variable? by Pimozv.Log::Timeline Visualisation in IntelliJ by Valle Lukas.CUnion nested inside of a CStruct? by Elronnd.rotor cool too! by Simon Proctor.Date objects here by Simon Proctor.multi by .NativeCall and variable argument lists by Marcel Timmerman.~ with Regex syntax? by ToddAndMargo.zef uninstall . by Fernando Santagata.New modules:
Updated modules:
After enjoying some rest and relaxation in Ireland and Scotland (yes, whisky distilleries were visited), it was good to be back home again. And what a two weeks it has been online! Good to see so many new Perl 6 modules. Hope to see many more next week!
While the ferry is slowly exiting the Cherbourg harbour en route to Dublin (trying out an alternate route to Ireland from mainland Europe without having to enter the UK), yours truly found some time laying around in the lounge. And used that to write this week’s Perl 6 Weekly.
The Riga video team has created separate videos of the presentations at PerlCon in Riga. These are the Perl 6 ones:
See an overview of all videos in case you missed a presentation (/r/perl6, /r/perl comments).
Madeleine Goebel published the wrapup: Summer in Review of her GSoC Self Contained Executable Project. In it, she describes how you can now make an executable out of any user program that does not use modules, or uses a single module. Clearly, work is still needed to make this feature more generally applicable. But these are amazing steps forward (/r/perl6 comments)!
Sterling Hanenkamp elaborates about how he uses Build.pm to organize complex build issues for Perl 6 distributions.
Christoph Cullmann posted a blog about editor highlighting called
“KSyntaxHighlighting – Over 300 Highlightings…” (/r/perl6 comments).
Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #22:
Ruben Westerberg has been announced a Perl Weekly Champion. Also, Challenge #23 is up for your perusal (about which Aaron Sherman gives some pointers).
Several people commented on the plan to rename Perl 6 to Raku:
GB18030 encoding merged as well.repr mismatch with NativeCall.nqp::num functions.execstack fix merged..^ mean? by keerthi kalyan.NativeCall can’t find a function in Kernel32.dll by Holli.char and wchar_t in NativeCall by Holli.trans function hang forever when work with a single ^ or $ by chenyf.assuming by Ralph Mellor.C family? by Ralph Mellor.New modules:
Updated modules:
Yours truly will probably not be able to make the Perl 6 Weekly next week while travelling (again). So, the next blog post about the Perl 6 Programming Language, will most likely be published on 9 September. See you then!
Yes, the Perl 6 Weekly is back. If there is one thing yours truly has learned, that it is not a good idea to skip 2 issues. Once, in the past, maybe. But nowadays, it just almost gets too much to process while writing the weekly. And probably to read as well. Well, hoping not too much was missed in the past 3 weeks, let’s go!
The Riga video team has not found the time yet to create separate videos of the presentations yet. There are full days streams available though:
A number of participants have already posted reports of the event:
Thanks to Lee Johnson, the videos of the Swiss Perl Workshop 2019 have become available. These are the ones with Perl 6 content:
Luis F. Uceta has become the winner of this month’s Documentation proofreading Squashathon. Thanks to all other participants: better luck winning a plushy Camelia next time!
David Cassel posted his second Perl 6 tutorial: Fun with Objects. It feels there is a Big Bang Theory reference somewhere in there.
Madeleine Goebel published two updates on her GSOC project:
It is really good to see so much progress on a feature that could well become one of the unique selling points of Rakudo Perl 6!
Tyler Limkemann went out playing and came back with a very nice blog post about rolling dice (/r/perl6, /r/programming, /r/geek, /r/perl comments). He also created a very nice Unicode character property lister (Reddit comments).
Aaron Sherman looked at a JSON grammar and felt his head spin. He also used this opportunity to create a guide for other programming languages wanting to implement Perl 6 regular expressions (Reddit comments).
A rather interesting interview with Alan, user of obscure languages (Reddit comments).
Sterling Hanenkamp took his new blog for a spin with “Multi-stage Docker builds are your friend“. It shows how it helps him build a single end-product that’s uncluttered by extra build configuration and tooling.
Timo Paulssen got adventurous and live coded a Hilbert curve with Cairo inside of GTK.
Aaron Sherman explores the differences between Perl 5 and Perl 6 with excellent linguistic research and examples (Reddit comments).
Aaron Sherman also did a little challenge of his own with “Fun little challenge: Forest Fire numbers“. One could wonder whether a submission for the Perl Weekly Challenge wouldn’t have been a better idea.
Jeff Goff posted another blog posts on templating in Perl 6 called “Templates II: Electric Boogaloo“.
Finally, Aaron Sherman started a re-evaluation of the .perl method, which resulted in a problem solving issue.
Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #19:
Damian Conway repeated his look back on the challenge with “Greed is good, balance is better, beauty is best.” (Reddit comments).
Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #20:
Damian Conway again repeated his look back on the challenge with “With friends like these…” (Reddit, Hacker News comments).
Blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #21:
Meanwhile, Challenge #22 is up for your perusal!
MingW systems.DBIish record insertion benchmark.nqp:: opcodes.GB2312 encoding (simplified Chinese).Date objects losing their formatter with certain operations.EVAL when run at compile time in the mainline of a precompiled module. He also made sure that each compiled setting knows of which language version it is.Date object “forgets” formatter? by Jo Christian Oterhals.Comma uses? by JJ Merelo.split function as an integer list / array by Romario.R metaoperator apparently reverses lists too by JJ Merelo.dir results by directory age? by con.for loop by Abeer (Reddit comments).SetHash declared as state %set is SetHash[Str] inside a loop by 850.rakudobrew cannot build moar by con.react-ing to more than one Supply at a time by Holli.. and " by lisprogtor.Term::Readkey on Windows by José Lula da Silva.@ represents Positional by Brad Gilbert.Channels by Simon Proctor.Uri testing, please by Jonathan Stowe.xx creates an array? by Anagura Yakumo..squish by Jo Christian Oterhals.Findbin::libs in Perl 6 by The Perl Shop.URI by Jonathan Stowe.DEPRECATED routine by Marcel Timmerman.Array by Mikkel.$/.pos after an unsuccessful match without a temporary variable? by Raymond Dresens.New modules:
Updated modules:
At PerlCon in Riga, yours truly announced that she would open up a problem solving” issue, in which she would ask to rename the “Perl 6 Programming Language” to (eventually) “The Raku Programming Language”. (/r/perl, /r/perl6, perl6-users, Facebook, Lobsters comments).
Some selected comments from the issue itself (in chronological order):
After getting a better idea on how this would work, this resulted in a Pull Request, which is currently under review. If this pull request gets accepted by all reviewers, then this will cause “Perl 6” to be renamed to “Raku”.
And with that out of the way for now: next week’s Perl 6 Weekly will most likely be delayed, or possibly skipped altogether, due to yours truly travelling for some non-Perl related events. So, if not next week, see you in two weeks time then for more Perl 6 news!
Shortly after the 2019.07 Rakudo compiler release, it was discovered that it has some issues with the build system that affect packaging. At the same time, some important stability and reliability fixes were committed in MoarVM. So Samantha McVey did a MoarVM point release, and Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev put an NQP and Rakudo 2019.07.1 compiler release together. A Rakudo Star release is now expected to appear soon.
Jonathan Worthington announced the 2019.07 Comma Community Release, the IDE of choice for Perl 6 application development. This new release adds a very exciting visualizer for Log::Timeline output, which is very useful for visualizing asynchronous workflows and understanding parallelization.
Around Saturday 3 August, there will be a documentation proofreading Squashathon. On this monthly Bug Squash day, people all over the world get together online for virtual pizza, and possibly win a plushy Camelia. Check it out: proofreading documentation shouldn’t be too hard, should it?
Kudo’s to ZhongnianTao for their work on implementing the GB2312 encoding. Somehow this fell through the cracks the past weeks. Looking forward to more of these in the future!
David P. Kendal, with a simple announcement on the #perl6 IRC channel, has taken the old and venerable IRC bot yoleaux offline. She will be missed. David P. Kendal, thanks for running it for all those years! Aleks-Daniel Jakimenko-Aleksejev expects to have a replacement bot up and running soon.
Jeff Goff describes his foray into the name mangling that is needed for working with external C++ libraries in A Regex amuse-bouche (Facebook comments).
Herbert Breunung elaborates on his work on the Math::Matrix module and his future plans for it. All comments, remarks, suggestions will appreciated (Twitter comments).
Steve Roe has returned to the Perl 6 blogging fold with Mind the gap, announcing the alpha release of the Physics::Measure module.
cygx has created a Perl Language Family page (Reddit comments).
Simon Proctor had to do some load testing and reached for Perl 6. The result, after using a one-liner for prototyping, is a very nice blog post with a complete script for doing load testing as a bonus.
Aaron Sherman realized that you can sometimes be tempted to write potentially linenoisy code in Perl 6. But that there is a way around it, in My swiggles are getting boggled.
Alexey Melezhik shows how to use Sparrow6 for testing Powershell applications.
This week’s blog posts with Perl 6 solutions for Challenge #18:
Damian Conway repeated his look back on the challenge of the previous week with two excellent blog posts, titled “Six Slices of Pie” (Facebook, Reddit, private comments) and “Chopping substrings“.
Meanwhile, Challenge #19 is up for your perusal!
ConcBlockingQueue, spesh, autoboxing, big integer operations, string operations, and slurpy argument handling, all of which could cause memory corruption if a Garbage Collect would kick in at a vulnerable time.perl6 an .EXE file on Windows.Map objects may contain containers, to fix an issue with exporting scalar containers. This is potentially a breaking change, as this also makes Map an object, rather than a value type. May be reverted depending on error reports the coming weeks and/or ecosystem fallout.reduce by Romario.proto regex with grammar by guifa.Term::Readkey by ryn1x.It appears I missed a few weeks of mails on the perl6-user mailing list. These have not been mentioned before in the Perl 6 Weekly:
is inlinable trait missing from docs by Marcel Timmerman.while(<>){...} analog? by Joseph Brenner.New modules:
Updated modules:
After a week of record temperatures, it looks like a more normal summertime ahead for the coming weeks. In which yours truly will take a 3-week break from this weekly post about the Perl 6 Programming Language. For a number of reasons: preparing for a keynote presentation at PerlCon in Riga, travel to/from Riga on the next two Mondays, and generally needing a bit away from the churning of the Perl community. So, unless someone else takes over Perl 6 Weekly’s responsabilities, the next Perl 6 weekly will be arriving around the 19th of August. See you then!
Weekly changes in and around Raku (Née Perl 6) 