The past week (well, actually 10 days by now), was mostly dominated by the FOSDEM happening in Brussels. The roster of Perl 6 related presentations was quite impressive:
- nine++ Leapfrogging the bootstrap
Bringing whole module ecosystems to Perl 6. (Slides) - pmichaud++ How (not) to create a language specification for Perl 6
Lessons learned (Slides) - FROGGS++ Binding C libraries
A journey (Slides) - CurtisOvidPoe++ Perl 6
A Dynamic Language for Mere Mortals - tadzik++ “Fast enough” Perl 6
How I learned to stop worrying and love games - jnthn++ Perl 6
Beyond dynamic vs. static (slides) - TimToady++ Get ready to party!
Videos of all of the presentations in the Perl devroom, and TimToady’s presentation will become available in the coming weeks.
Production Ready Release This Year
TimToady++ announced that he expects that September 2015 will see a Release Candidate of Perl 6. And that barring any unforeseen circumstances of the “getting hit by a bus” type, we should see a Production Ready Release of Perl 6 before Christmas 2015. This got the intertubes buzzing. Before we all can rejoice, a lot of work will need to be done, specifically on the Great List Refactor (GLR), the Native, Shaped Arrays (NSA) and the Normalization Form Grapheme (NFG). And many other cleanups, as well as documentation patches and tests to be written. Your help is very welcome!
Public Service Announcements
- pmichaud++ is preparing a blog post about the discussions within the Rakudo team while in Brussels. Be sure to follow his blog.
- pmichaud++ also announced that in the future, non-core code will need to do a use nqp; to be able to access NQP functions.
Development Allsorts
You would think that not a lot happened in the past week because many contributors were working on their FOSDEM slides and/or travelling to Brussels. But it appears the reality is different. hoelzro++ worked on the sanity of type coercions. lizmat worked again on making adverbed slices faster (only 10% though, this time). Mouq++ allowed for indented code blocks in pod to contain empty lines (without breaking the code into separate entities). moritz++ moved the Real.sleep method to Numeric, and then DEPRECATED it. Mouq++ made auto-vivification on LoL’s work and implemented the semi-colon version of the MAIN sub. FROGGS++ and retopmuca++ allowed passing of Buf/Blob to NativeCall functions directly. And retopmuca++ and sergot++ got IO::Socket::SSL to wrap existing socket connections.
Signing off for this week
Sorry for this issue to be so late in the week. But FOSDEM messed enough with my daily rhythm as to need some time to recuperate. As always, please let me know of any errors, omissions, additions!
Weekly changes in and around Raku (Née Perl 6) 